about
https://www.kenmarchionnostudio.com
Ken Marchionno is an artist, writer, curator living in the Los Angeles area. His work has been featured in exhibitions and festivals throughout North America, South America, Europe, and Asia, including the Smithsonian Institute, the Multimedia Center of the National Center for the Arts in Mexico City, the Moscow Film Festival, the Third China Songzhuang Culture and Art Festival, the California Museum of Photography and Riverside Art Museum, the US Embassy in Prague, and the Museum of Art and History in Lancaster, CA.
Much of Marchionno's work is community engaged, social practice. His ongoing project, 300 Miles to Wounded Knee was started in 2004, collaborates with reservation youth and uses social media as its primary platform.
In spring 2024, Ken traveled to Italy to produce @versopatria, an Instagram project about his return to the birth town of his grandparents—100 years after they left. Not knowing anyone there, he rented an apartment online, arrived by taxi, and stranded himself in this tiny mountain town for a month. Having no language skills, and no real knowledge of his heritage, he had to rely on electronic translators and the few English speakers in town. The community embrace was overwhelming. Every day for the duration, he posted up to ten photos and 250 words focusing on the experience, the effects of multi-generational assimilation, the return from the diaspora, and the collapse of time and space on return to a homeland. This summer he returned to the location his family first arrived in the US to produce a body of work on the Italian-American experience in this country. @i_quartiere focuses on immigration, representation, and the economic migrations that brought people to these shores a century ago.
Marchionno's work has received funding from the arts and humanities, and most recently the California Community Foundation, the Society for Photographic Education, and the Sidney Stern Memorial Trust.
His work has been included in Dr. Betty Ann Brown's Art and Mass Media, and Robert Hirsch's Exploring Color Photography and Light and Lens, Thinking about Photography in the Digital Age. He has given talks on his work in the US and abroad, including the US Embassy in Prague, the John Fante Literary Festival in Italy, the Journey Museum in Rapid City, Wellesley College, and CalArts.
In the mid-2000's Ken worked as a commercial photographer for local clothing and accessories designers. And a digital and lighting technician with Annie Leibovitz, Steven Klein, Craig McDean, for Vogue, Vanity Fair, Valentino, Prada. He worked as a commercial retoucher on campaigns for Pandora Jewelry, Forum Snowboards, and Daisy Fuentes Fashion. And in the early days of digital filmmaking, Ken ran seminars for RED Cinema to introduce motion/still technology to fashion photographers in LA, NY, and London.
Ken was a stringer for the Associated Press in the mid-2000's and his photography has been featured in magazines and journals in the US and Korea, including the contemporary art quarterly, X-TRA. He has written criticism for Art Papers and Sajin Yaesul, and his creative writing has been featured in the literary journals Errant Bodies and Framework.
Ken was Director of tractionarts, an alternative video space in the downtown Los Angeles Arts District between 2013 and 2016, and curated exhibitions for Spring Break Art Show in Los Angeles in 2019, and the Deagu Photo biennale in South Korea, 2016.
