Globally Connected @ FIT: Exploring Identity Through Art

In an exciting panel discussion, three inspiring artists—FIT in Milan Professor Annalisa Mazzoli, Photography Professor Ron Amato, and FIT alum Steven Molina Contreras—explore themes of identity, personal history, intimate relationships, and time.

Annalisa Mazzoli is an artist and professor at FIT Milan, where she has been teaching photo styling and fashion communication since 2017. Originally from Modena, she studied at ISIA Graphic Institute University of Urbino and held a scholarship at FABRICA, Benetton’s Research Centre of Communication. Specializing in fashion photography, portrait and still life, Annalisa has been working as a professional photographer for advertising agencies and magazines such as Glamour, VanityFair, Gioia, Amica, DonnaModerna. She also worked at the International Center of Photography in New York City, and taught at Afol Moda Milan.

Steven Molina Contreras (b.1999, San Salvador, El Salvador) is a lens-based artist living and working in New York. His work focuses on themes of migration, matriarchy, sacrifice, and love by surveying his family’s personal and social history in the United States and El Salvador. Through an approach that employs the aesthetics of documentary and staged photography, Molina Contreras challenges insular views of migrants by expanding their depictions and reclaiming the land and images they portray. Molina Contreras holds a BFA in Photography and Related Media from the Fashion Institute of Technology. His work has been featured by Aperture, Humble Arts Foundation, The New York Times Magazine, and the New Yorker to name a few. He was also an artist in residence at Lightwork in 2021.

Ron Amato is a Professor in Photography and Related Media at Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. Ron’s art practice revolves around his identity as a Gay man. Some of the issues explored in Ron’s work are aging within the Gay community, male representation in social media and the attack on LGBTQ people by the previous executive branch of the federal government in the United States. His first monograph, The Box, visually represents Ron’s journey from a boy born into a second-generation Italian-American family in Brooklyn, NY to his current position as a respected educator and artist. Ron is a leader for diversity and inclusion on the FIT campus, serving nine years on The President’s Diversity Council. He has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally. His seminal exhibition of sexual self-portraits in NYC in 2000, established Ron as a leading Queer artist. He has a BFA in Photography from School of Visual Art, NYC and an MFA in New Media Art and Performance from Long Island University. He currently lives in Brooklyn with his husband, Seth, and their two Fox Terriers, Ben and Zeb.

About Globally Connected @ FIT

Globally Connected @ FIT is a series of 45-minute virtual discussions led by students, faculty, and alumni to advance global education at FIT in our world with limited mobility. The major themes are fashion, art, sustainability, racial equity, and life during the pandemic around the world. Hosted by the Office of International Programs and the Cultural Fellows, and the History of Art Department.

This virtual event is free and open to the public; REGISTER HERE.