Emilie di Nunzio James

Emilie di Nunzio James
Period: 2008-2009

Born in 1976

Emilie di Nunzio James is a photographer with an atypical background. Trained at the Ecole Supérieure des Arts Appliqués in Paris, she quickly moved into haute-couture embroidery workshops, before reappropriating this practice and extending it to contemporary art. It was through the prism of photography that her talent as a visual artist was revealed, through her poetic and facetious Broderie Fraîche signature, still lifes of raw hand embroidery on fresh plants. Discovered by Alain Sayag, founder of the photographic cabinet at Beaubourg (Centre Pompidou) in Paris, she was awarded a prize at the Académie de France in Rome in 2008. The granddaughter of Italian immigrants, she returned to her roots, working on the foundations of Roman artistic identity through a popular approach, that of tourist souvenirs, miniature Pietàs, the Last Supper and other tales. For Villa Medici, she will be designing the scenography for Granet’s major exhibition, Le plein air romantique, as well as the portfolio for the restoration of the Parnassus fountain in the Bosco. She will document her year of residency in her Bulletin de Pension, Emilie et Les Lions, a photographic diary of the everyday and the extraordinary of Médicis life. She later paid tribute to this seminal residency with Madre Villa, Une lettre d’amour, now in the library collections of the institution celebrating its 350th anniversary. Since then, the prolific artist has pursued her multi-disciplinary research in this ever singular trend, that of magic realism, where the rigor of hyper-poetry takes her to different media: literature, sound, installations, videos, and always, photography.

Emilie di Nunzio James’ work has been exhibited in China, the Netherlands, France and Italy.

Insta @emiliedinunziojames