Biography

Rose Marasco is a prolific photographer and an award winning educator. 

Marasco is Distinguished Professor Emerita, University of Southern Maine. In 1979, she initiated and secured accreditation for the photography curriculum at USM where she taught for 35 years. Prior to this at age 24, she was asked to begin the photography program at the School of Art/Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, NY, where she taught for 5 years. Currently she serves as a faculty mentor and a visiting artist at several MFA programs.

Her Projection Series photographs were recently featured at the inaugural Photofairs, exhibition at the Javits Center, NYC, 2023. This was also the release of her book, At Home (see below for more info).

Marasco has had significant solo museum shows, including at: the Houston Center for Photography, the Davis Museum of Art at Wellesley College, Farnsworth Museum of Art, the University of New England Art Gallery, Ogunquit Museum of American Art, the Universite de Bretagne Occidentale, Brest, France, and the Latvian Museum of Photography, in Riga. Her retrospective, index, originated at the Portland Museum of Art in 2015.; and, travelled to her hometown museum, Munson in 2018. index was nationally featured /reviewed in Hyperallergic, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, American Photo Magazine, OSMOS, Downeast Magazine, The Maine Sunday Telegram, The Portland Phoenix, and numerous other publications in Maine and New England.

Marasco’s solo gallery exhibits include at the Sarah Morthland Gallery, NYC ( 1998, 2000, and 2002). These exhibits were reviewed or highlighted in the New Yorker, The New York Times, and New York Magazine. In 2014 she had a solo show with an accompanying full catalogue of her NYC color pinhole photographs, at Meredith Ward Fine Art, NYC. Marasco has had twenty-four solo exhibitions and has participated in seventy-two group shows.

Her photographs are included in numerous private and public collections of distinction including: The Fogg Museum at Harvard University; Fidelity Investments Corporate Art Collection; The Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College; The New York Public Library Photography Collection; The Portland Museum of Art; The Bowdoin College Museum of Art; the Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, and the Library of Congress among others. She has lectured extensively about her work, including at: Harvard University, Parsons School of Design, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, Bowdoin College, Bates College and numerous colleges and museums across the country. Marasco has a B.F.A. from Syracuse University and a M.F.A. from the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York, where she studied with Nathan and Joan Lyons.

Marasco has recently completed a book of photographs and text entitled, At Home. Inspired by the 1837 Greek Revival home she purchased on auction in 2003. From the very first day she began to find objects (currently numbering 83) throughout the house and yard. Several of the objects related directly to her own life and background. She began to write about these connections, researched the history of the house, make photographs of the objects in various ways, and examined her own trajectory as an artist and a teacher. This includes how the arts, particularly drawing, printmaking and photography, have shaped her life from a very young age. She writes too about the invention of photography (officially noted as 1839) as it parallels the 1837 construction of the house. At Home includes selected bodies of her work as portfolios and a Foreword by Lucy R. Lippard.

While working on the book she continues with her lifelong journey of exploring the definition of what a photograph is and can be. Often working at artists residencies, at MacDowell, at Arteles Creative Center in Finland, at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA), and by invitation at Canterbury Shaker Village (N.H.) she is inspired in new directions. The recent work picks up on her strategies of layering and projections, first achieved in her Circle series 2001-02, and fully realized in Projections, 2005-08 and continuing in her recent major projects.

Visiting Artist

I have lectured and/or been a visiting artist at over 60 venues. I have worked with both undergraduate and graduate students in all disciplines. I aim to help each student identify their strengths, examine their artistic decisions, and the language of their artistic practice. I will cite both contemporary and historical artists for students to explore and research. I am especially keen to assist each person to find and expand their particular strengths and to bring their work to the next level. As an exhibiting artist, I can speak from first hand experience of professional practices in both museums and galleries. Recently, I have done several portfolio reviews and would be delighted to do more of these as well. Please contact me to discuss an invitation to your workshop, college, or institution.

with thanks,
Rose