Penelope Umbrico

Penelope Umbrico is an American photographer. She graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto and, later on, earned her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where she is now a faculty member in the Department of Photography, Video, and Related Media. In her work, she uses appropriation and reproduction of found imagery in order to explore the role of images in today’s digitalised culture. Known for appropriating various images found on the web, she uses platforms such as Flickr and Craigslist in order to collect a variety of pictures that she then manipulates to construct larger images or installations. By reframing pictures on the internet as a collective archive of human lives and habits, her work offers a deep commentary on the banality of consumer culture. Umbrico’s work, through the use of appropriation, creates a unique bridge between personal and collective expressions. Umbrico’s work has been exhibited at MoMA PS1 in New York City, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, at The Photographers’ Gallery in London, and at the Daegu Photography Biennale in Korea, among many others, and is represented in museum collections around the world. She has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award.