11 AM Friday 20 February 2026

Marianne Bernstein
Expanding the Practice, an artist, independent curator, and author
in conversation with RA+DI Co-Founder, Dimitry Saïd Chamy

Marianne Bernstein is an artist and independent curator whose work moves fluidly across photography, film, publishing, and socially engaged installation. Her practice centers on lived experience, place, and collaboration, often unfolding over long timeframes, across international borders, and outside traditional art spaces.

About our Speaker

Marianne Bernstein is an artist and independent curator. Dark Side of the Moon, published in 2026, is her third book of photographs, following Theatre of the Everyday (2024), an artist’s book spanning 40 years that explores the poetics of everyday life, and Tatted (2009), an exploration of South Street, Philadelphia’s tattoo community.

Her photographs have been exhibited nationally, and her film, From Philadelphia to the Front (2005), which she co-directed and produced with Judy Gelles, has traveled to 15 festivals worldwide.
Due South, a project and exchange based in Sicily involving 32 American and International artists, was exhibited in 2017 at The Delaware Contemporary in their three main galleries and was her second curatorial project in a quartet: Due North, Due South, Due East, and Due West.

In 2011, The Play House, a nomadic version of The Welcome House, premiered in an installation on Broad Street titled “Not a Vacant Lot”, drawing attention to the 40,000 vacant lots in Philadelphia. The cube traveled in 2012 to Artspace in New Haven for an installation titled “Beyond What Was” in partnership with Liberty Safe Haven, exploring homelessness and drug addiction, funded by an ArtWorks grant from the NEA. Over time, the cube has become more minimal and was re-titled Nomadicube, with five interventions produced on the South, North, East, and West sides of Chicago (2019 – 2020) in collaboration with local artists and communities.

That same year, Bernstein was a finalist for the Pew Fellowship in the Arts. She completed two artist residencies in Iceland, both in small fishing villages. Work from these residencies was included in the exhibition Due North, which brought together 30 American and Icelandic artists. She was awarded a 2013 Fellowship by the Independence Foundation in the Arts for this work.
In 2009, she conceived and produced The Welcome House in Love Park, Philadelphia, in a 10′ transparent cube (an artist residency by day and video installation at night) and Shelter at the Painted Bride which paired 18 artists with families on the verge of homelessness. In 2010, she conceived and curated The Philadelphia Underground, a site-specific video installation featuring six Philadelphia filmmakers who produced work inside the neglected subway concourse underneath Broad Street and City Hall—calling attention to conditions there.

In the 1990s in New Haven, CT, she founded untitled(space) and The Lot, and co-founded Citywide Open Studios, which incorporated “alternative (empty) spaces” as a call to broaden art practices beyond the traditional studio setting. These programs merged into ArtSpace continuing well into the 2020s—long after her departure in 2000. She returned to her hometown of Philadelphia where she worked for 17 years. Bernstein currently lives and works in Chicago and Paris.

Admission Free
FIU Biscayne Bay Campus – Academic II Suite 150
3000 NE 151st St, Miami, FL 33181