About

Major Exhibitions, Festivals, Screenings, and Presentations

Ken Marchionno's work has been exhibited, screened, and presented nationally and internationally at museums, cultural institutions, universities, festivals, and public forums. Selected venues include the Smithsonian Institution, the National Center for the Arts (Mexico City), the Third China Songzhuang Culture and Art Festival, the California Museum of Photography, the U.S. Embassy Prague, the Museum of Art and History Lancaster, the Journey Museum, the John Fante Festival (Italy), Wellesley College, and California Institute of the Arts. He has also presented lectures, artist talks, and scholarly presentations at conferences, and cultural institutions, including the Italian American Studies Association Conference (2025 and 2026). Working across photography, video, installation, social practice, and interactive media, his projects explore memory, identity, archives, and community participation.

Awards, Recognition, and Publications

Marchionno's work has received support from the arts and humanities, including a California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2017) and a Society for Photographic Education Future Focus Grant (2015). In 2022, he was adopted into the Lakota Nation in recognition of nearly two decades of collaborative work supporting Lakota cultural preservation, storytelling, youth media initiatives, and community archiving.

His work has been reproduced and discussed in Robert Hirsch's Exploring Color Photography and Light and Lens, Dr. Betty Ann Brown's Art and Mass Media, and X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly. His writing and criticism have been published internationally, including a monthly column in Sajin Yaesul, South Korea's main fine art photography magazine in the late 90’s, Exposure, and Art Papers.

Professional Photography and Media Experience

Before entering higher education full-time, Marchionno spent more than a decade in commercial and editorial photography during the transition from film to digital capture. As a digital and lighting technician, he worked with Annie Leibovitz, Steven Klein, and Craig McDean on campaigns for Vogue, Vanity Fair, Prada, and Valentino, helping develop digital capture workflows that became foundational to contemporary photographic production.

At the same time, he worked as a freelance photojournalist and Associated Press stringer, experience that continues to inform his documentary and community-based work. He later operated a commercial photography studio, producing campaigns for Los Angeles fashion and accessories designers while providing post-production retouching for Pandora Jewelry, Forum Snowboards, and other lifestyle brands.

As digital cinema became a viable alternative to film, he developed and presented seminars for RED Digital Cinema in New York, Los Angeles, and London, introducing photographers and filmmakers to emerging digital motion technologies.

Teaching and Academic Leadership

For more than twenty years, Marchionno has taught photography, visual storytelling, visual culture, media studies, and professional practice at undergraduate and graduate levels in the United States and internationally. His appointments include ArtCenter College of Design, where he served as faculty member and Interim Chair, California Baptist University, Pomona College, Claremont Graduate University, California State University Long Beach, Chung-Ang University and Kyongbuk College in South Korea.

His work has included curriculum development, mentorship, departmental leadership, and the creation of international educational and exhibition opportunities for students, including the Daegu Photo Biennale in Korea, and the Pingyao International Photography Festival in China. In 2020, he authored a departmental inclusiveness report for ArtCenter’s Photography and Imaging Department, helped diversify faculty hiring, and expanded interdisciplinary opportunities for the college.

Curatorial and Arts Leadership

From 2013–2016, Marchionno founded and directed TRACTIONARTS, a contemporary art and community space in Los Angeles' Arts District that presented screenings and public programs focused on experimental video from across the world. In 2019, he served as a local curator for the Los Angeles edition of Spring/Break Art Show during Frieze Week, organizing a booth featuring international experimental media. His curatorial work includes alternative art spaces, screenings, public programs, and community-based cultural initiatives.

Signature Community Projects

A defining aspect of Marchionno's practice is the creation of long-term projects that combine art, education, storytelling, and archive-building. Since 2004, he has partnered with community members across the Lakota Oyate to document the annual Oomaka Tokatakiya: Future Generations Ride, a 300-mile horseback memorial to the site of the Wounded Knee Massacre. What began as documentary coverage evolved into a twenty-year collaborative archive preserving Indigenous stories and contemporary experiences. The archive is being preserved in partnership with Oglala Lakota College.

As an extension of this work, he founded the Future Generations Teen Photojournalism Project, providing Indigenous youth with training, mentorship, equipment, exhibition opportunities, and participation in building their own community archive. Student work from the project has been exhibited internationally, including The US Embassy in Prague, a two-year exhibition at MACHmit! Museum in Berlin. Student videos were featured in the 2020 Heritage Film Festival and Contemporary Native American Shorts. Ken also created the What's Your Story? Project, a public storytelling initiative combining portraiture, oral history, and community engagement at events including Cambodia Town, LA Pride, and Leimert Park Juneteenth.

Other Significant Creative Projects

Alongside his community-based work, Marchionno maintains an active studio practice spanning photography, video, installation, archives, and interactive media. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he created Covid Parallels, a video series pairing ordinary daily moments with contemporary news reports and public discourse to examine the relationship between lived experience, collective trauma, and historical memory.

Other projects include Proof of Life, a photographic series constructed from retired dental X-rays that examines memory, identification, disappearance, and institutional systems of seeing, and Sacred Space, a series exploring architecture, faith, and computational image-making through vertical panoramas shot inside Italian cathedrals.

Through the social media storytelling projects @versopatria (Toward Home) and The Quarter, Marchionno explores migration, ancestry, assimilation, and return from the Italian diaspora, drawing from his family's journey from Abruzzo to America to investigate identity, belonging, memory, cultural inheritance, and the compression of space and time.

Early Interactive Media and Video Work

Beginning in the late 1990s, before interactive media became mainstream, Marchionno developed interactive video and nonlinear digital works exploring audience participation and user-driven narrative. In 2001, his interactive video Cathedral was presented at the Moscow International Film Festival. Combining randomizing code and nonlinear navigation, the work invited viewers to construct meaning through participation rather than fixed narrative.

Through the early 2000s, he continued developing interactive works including axis and good and evil, projects that extended randomized structures, immersive design, and multiple pathways to challenge traditional cinematic forms. The works were exhibited and screened internationally in venues across Los Angeles, Mexico City, Chile, Argentina, and Spain during the formative years of interactive media art.

Summary

Ken Marchionno's career spans photography, video, interactive media, education, curation, and community engagement. His work has been exhibited internationally, from the Smithsonian Institution and major museums to festivals, universities, and community venues. He helped shape early digital imaging workflows, was an early innovator in interactive media, and has taught and mentored students for more than two decades. His background in commercial photography, editorial production, and work as an Associated Press stringer informs a practice centered on storytelling, cultural preservation, public participation, and the creation of living archives.