ABOUT

Francesca Galliani is a queer visual artist born in Italy and based in New York City. Working across analogue photography and mixed media, they have spent more than four decades exploring identity, gender, sexuality, desire, memory, and transformation through image-making. Their practice is rooted in manual processes, from cutting and collaging negatives to producing and hand-toning gelatin silver prints in the darkroom. Galliani has worked in the darkroom since the early 1980s and continues to experiment with photographic materials and processes as a means of expanding the expressive possibilities of the medium.

Since the 1990s, Galliani has developed a significant body of work photographing transgender individuals across Thailand, Brazil, Italy, and the United States. In recent years, their practice has expanded to include mixed-media works derived from photographic negatives and an ongoing Book series, in which they work directly on found art-history books through painting, drawing, writing, and collage.

Galliani has exhibited internationally in museums, galleries, and biennials, including the Venice Biennale, Triennale di Milano, Museum Manege in Saint Petersburg, Museum Ciurlionis in Kaunas, and MAMbo in Bologna. Their work has been published in numerous books and featured in international publications including D la Repubblica, Corriere della Sera, Il Quotidiano, and Art Daily. Galliani received the Kodak European Panorama Award in Arles in 1995, and their work was recently included in Queer Art (Thames & Hudson, 2026), a major survey of contemporary queer visual culture.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I began working in photography in the early 1980s and have remained committed to analogue processes throughout my career. From cutting and collaging negatives to producing gelatin silver prints in the darkroom, I have always been interested in working directly with materials and allowing process to shape the final image. Transformation has become a guiding principle in my practice, as I continue to alter and rework photographs through experimentation, hand-toning, collage, drawing, and text.

Portraiture has been a central focus throughout my career. Over the years, I have photographed a wide range of subjects, including nudes, urban landscapes, diverse cultures, and communities often excluded from traditional forms of representation. Since the 1990s, I have developed a significant body of work photographing transgender individuals across multiple countries, including Thailand, Brazil, Italy, and the United States. I began this project at a time when very few artists were documenting transgender communities in this way. Through portraiture, I explore identity, embodiment, and the lived realities of people whose lives often exist outside conventional social and economic structures and beyond traditional categories of belonging. The project began as a way for me to better understand my own relationship to gender, and it has remained an ongoing engagement with questions of visibility, belonging, vulnerability, and strength. I seek to represent people with dignity, complexity, and presence while challenging prejudice, discrimination, and violence directed toward marginalized communities.

Alongside this photographic work, I have developed an increasingly diaristic mixed-media practice. Working from photographs, scanned negatives, texts, and found art-history books, I build layered works through painting, drawing, writing, collage, and enlargement. Pages are selected, scanned, and reworked at larger scale, extending my ongoing interest in transformation, layering, and the instability of meaning. Political language and personal reflection frequently intersect within these pieces, bringing together questions of desire, identity, gender, sexuality, memory, and uncertainty.

Community has been essential throughout my artistic life. I am sustained by conversation with artists I trust, by openness to critique, and by a continuing commitment to experimentation and growth. Making work, learning, adapting, and remaining emotionally open are inseparable parts of my practice. Whether in the darkroom or through mixed media, I continue to return to transformation—not only as a material process, but as a way of understanding how people, images, and meanings evolve over time.