Melissa Catanese

About Episode 86

In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha sits down with Melissa Catanese—photographer, publisher, and educator. They dive into Melissa’s array of book projects, including her 2023 release, “The Lottery” (The Ice Plant), inspired by Shirley Jackson’s classic tale, perfectly resonating with today’s uncertain world. They also have an honest and in-depth conversation about Melissa’s life in photography, her commitment to pursuing her diverse artistic interests, and her innovative approaches to making a living as an artist.

About Melissa Catanese

Melissa Catanese combines her images with archival images into a fluid, sensorial experience that pushes the image beyond its nostalgic surface and challenges ideas of authorship, representation, consumption, and the life cycle of images. She plays with images as raw material, intuitively teasing out oblique and guttural interpretations, tapping the inexplicable, and often dormant space within the surface of a photograph where meaning extends and recedes, comforts and disturbs. She is the author of “Dive Dark Dream Slow”, “Voyagers”, “The Lottery”, and “Fever field”. Her work is currently included in “Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape” at Carnegie Museum of Art. She is the recipient of a Heinz Endowment Creative Development Award and has been shortlisted for the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards and the Foam Paul Huf Award. Catanese contributed texts to “Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Shoot” (Aperture, 2021), “Photographers Looking At Photographs: 75 Pictures from the Pilara Foundation” (Pier 24, 2020), The Photographer’s Playbook (Aperture, 2014) and to the project “Words Without Pictures” (Aperture, 2010), among other publications. She is a Teaching Professor at University of Pittsburgh and holds visiting appointments at Hartford Art School Photography MFA and Image Text Ithaca MFA.