Biography

Christine Palamidessi is known in the art world for a practice that spans writing, filmmaking, sculpture, and printmaking and relates the interweaving of memory formation and perception of time to the female form. Her work typically shows fragmented artifacts, myths and words that have been partially reconstructed using tactile traditional materials, such as paper, plaster and inks.

 In 2017and 2022 she was Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome. Palamidessi's awards include the Barbara Demming Award for Women Artists, an UrbanArt award for public art, a Dante Alighieri Fellowship, BAU Institute residency, and Mass MoCA residency. Her work is held in collections in France, the Dominican Republic, Italy, Saudi Arabia and the United States, and she has exhibited galleries in Boston, New York, Washington DC, Woodstock, Vermont, Pittsburgh, and overseas in Tel Aviv, Lecce, Otranto and Spongano, Italy.  She was a professor at Boston University for 13 years before devoting herself to a full time fine art practice. 

Christine Palamidessi grew up along the Allegheny River in Western Pennsylvania among a family of Tuscan immigrants. She left her hometown in the 80s to live in New York City, where she wrote about film and the emerging video scene. She later moved to Boston. She has studied mask-making and cartapesta with artisans in Venice, Rome, and Lecce, Italy. 

Her training in the visual arts, enhanced Palamidessi's work as a writer and reviewer.  She  is a published novelist. THE VIRGIN KNOWS and THE FIDDLE CASE are available online and in libraries. In 2020, she completed a ten year 'love-of-family-art-and-writing' project, BRIDGE OF LOVE. It's an ancestral memoir about her grandparents who fell in love in in a small village in Tuscany in1919 and emigrated to the States. She, along with Carol Albright, are editors of the book AMERICAN WOMEN, ITALIAN STYLE.  

“Grandmothers,” her memoir, is engraved on a granite monolith and installed as public

art at Boston's MBTA station, Jackson Square, on the Orange Line.

Paper is a primary love, having written novels, and for print magazines and newspaper, she now uses paper to create sculpture.