Biography
Daniel Dallabrida is a story-teller, una racconta favole. He moves freely between the realms of process, ritual, installation, and artifact. Using sculpture, photography, words, video, sound, and his personal history, he encourages people to find their own experience in winding the currents of the tales he tells.
In 2003, Dallabrida stepped away from his work in HIV/AIDS activism and moved to Italy in pursuit of the art, culture, and language of his heritage. There he apprenticed at a family foundry near Venice. Then, attracted by the Tuscan tradition of anti-Fascist ceramic sculpture, he studied at Studio Arts Centers International in Florence, before completing an MFA at California College of the Arts in 2011. He has been a resident artist at Anderson Ranch Arts Center, LASALLE College of the Arts and Kala Art Institute. Dallabrida has presented in Milan, Rome, Florence, Singapore, San Francisco and Aspen, CO.
Dallabrida’s primary purpose in making art and telling stories is to create a new means to identify and build community. For him, artists possess the skill and bear the responsibility to round out each moment of life: uncovering subtlety in the face of awe, permanence in the face of erasure, ambiguity in the face of clarity, wonder in the face of horror. Art identifies the cracks in the foundations, he says. It illuminates the scaffolding of possibility.
