Artist Bio

Christa Parravani grew up in Camp Lejune, North Carolina, a Marine Corps base on the southern coast of the state with her identical twin sister Cara. She was introduced to Heavy Metal music by her stepfather who listened to bands like Black Sabbath and Guns-n-Roses while he worked out. He taught the girls all of the words to the songs and as they aged they became lost in the possibility that the lyrics and guitar offered a means of escape from their daily lives. Heavy Metal in this setting was the music of war, the younger marines would listen to it and get pumped up about the possibility of combat. Christa however relied on the softer ballads of love and common anthems of suicide to make possible the idea that she might one day be free of that base and find a world where men had long hair instead of shaved heads and rebellion was possible sexually and lawfully. She used the music as a way to escape and created a fantasy world where she imagined she was loved and desired.

Christa has since studied creative writing and photography at Bard College and earned her MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University. She has completed two major bodies of photographic work, Kindred and Whatever I was in Life Spoon River. She has exhibited work at Photo New York, The AAF Contemporary Art fair in New York, Photo San Francisco, Sixtyseven Gallery, Julia Friedman Gallery, Gallery 400 in Chicago, The Woodstock Center for Photography, Midway Contemporary Art Galley in St. Paul, and the Kassel Academy of Art in Kassel, Germany. She was awarded the first Mortimer Frank Travel fellowship for her series, Other in 2003, and is the recipient of two MacDowell Fellowships. Her work has been published in PEN America, Crowd, Advocasey, the Columbia University SOA Bulletin, Small Spiral Notebook and as the cover art for Danielle Pafunda's Pretty Young Thing (Soft Skull Press), and is forthcoming in When Darkness Falls: A Survey of Contemporary Gothic Art. She is an assistant Professor at Keene state College and a lecturer in the MFA program in Visual Art at UMass Amherst and Dartmouth College. Christa has previously taught at the Purchase College of Art and Design, Columbia University and The San Francisco Art Institute.