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Frank
Pietronigro |
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Biography Frank Pietronigro is an interdisciplinary artist, educator and author currently working on helping produce Yuri’s Night Bay Area 2008 at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. The event is a unique convergence of artists, scientists, astronauts, performers, technologists, and musicians to pay tribute to our shared global heritage in space exploration. Pietronigro is the first American painter to create “drift paintings” where his body floated within a three-dimensional painting that he created in zero gravity aboard NASA’s KC135 turbojet. His work was featured in Space News in a feature titled “Artists Hope to Create New Science Fiction with Zero-G Flights” in the Sunday New York Times Arts and Leisure, Fortune Magazine, a cover feature in the San Francisco Art Institute Magazine, Hot Wired and Leonardo Magazine, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology publication of the International Society of Arts, Science and Technology. He is Co-Founder and Project Director of the Zero Gravity Arts Consortium, Associate Fellow at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, College of Fine Arts, Carnegie Mellon University and serves the space art community as one of the coordinators for Yuri’s Night Bay Area 2007-08 held at NASA Ames Research Center. In 2006, he was Co-Chair of the Space Art Track of the 25th International Space Development Conference, co-sponsored by the National Space Society and the Planetary Society. Pietronigro’s work has been presented with museums and institutions including: the Tate In Space, Tate Museum, London; the Maison Europeenne de la Photographie, Paris; Smart Project Space, Amsterdam; Museum für Gestaltung, Zurich; Galeria Ze Dos Bois, Lisbon; Castle Gallery, College of New Rochelle, NY; Southern Exposure Gallery, San Francisco; Blohard Gallery at Vox Populi, Philadelphia; the Mill Valley Film Festival and the Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center. Frank Pietronigro has been awarded multiple San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Commission Grants, a National Space Grant College and Fellowship Program Award, a Sobel Memorial Scholarship from the San Francisco Art Institute, a Creativity Certificate of Distinction from Art Direction Magazine, and a Merit Award from the Society of Communicating Arts during their 32nd Annual Exhibit of Advertising and Design. Pietronigro studied at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, the Multimedia Studies Program, San Francisco State University, and he received his Bachelor of Fine Arts, in Interdisciplinary Arts, from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1996. |