Alumni Spotlight: CAMILLA ANCILOTTO
- ericpriceny
- Oct 25
- 3 min read
Based in Rome, Camilla Ancilotto (MFA 1999) creates playful, interactive sculptures that invite people to touch, rotate, and explore them. Her work bridges painting and sculpture, encouraging direct engagement rather than passive viewing. Drawing on both her classical training and her love of storytelling, Camilla’s art celebrates curiosity, movement, and the joy of discovery—values that trace back to her time at the New York Academy of Art, where she first began experimenting with viewer participation.
How has experimentation transformed your creative process?
Experimentation has been a generative force in my creative process, continually redefining its language, materials, and forms of interaction. My thesis project at the New York Academy of Art in 1999 marked a pivotal moment: it was there that I first began exploring how to actively involve the viewer.
I created an interactive work made of rotating wooden tiles mounted on a metal structure—on one side, a reclining Venus; on the other, a fish. By rotating the tiles, the viewer witnessed a visual, poetic, and conceptual metamorphosis.
Later, my Ab Ovo series explored modularity inspired by the Tangram, through sculptures crafted from materials as varied as expanded polyurethane, corn fiber, steel, and bronze—engaging in a constant dialogue between form, tactility, and transformation.
My most recent series, Sinestesia, brings this research into more organic territory: small, oval, hand-held sculptures designed to be touched, observed, and experienced. Experimentation has thus reshaped my creative process into a more fluid synthesis of concept, material, and interaction.
What painting would people be surprised to learn you love so much?
I rarely keep my own works at home, but one hangs in my living room. It’s titled Pathways (2011–2012), measuring 51 x 43 inches. Inspired by a photograph by Marinella Paolini depicting a San Francisco street, the work is my personal reinterpretation of Rosso Fiorentino’s Deposition (1521). In my version, the famous scene of Christ being lowered from the Cross transforms into the white stripes of a road.
You’re hosting a dinner. Which three artists, living or dead, would you invite?
Picasso, Michelangelo, and Mark Rothko.
What’s happening in your studio right now?
I’m currently creating a new circular interactive work with a pattern of rotating forms that will debut at Art Basel Miami. But the project closest to my heart is Sinestesia—a body of work that presents an inventive way of approaching art. It consists of one hundred stainless-steel disks, along with three artist’s proofs—highly polished and mirror-like—produced by the renowned firm Poignèe, a true fabrique créative. Each disk becomes a surface where color and reflection meet.
The collection offers visions unbound by convention, suspended between material and gesture. Every piece brings together the coolness of metal and the warmth of paint—hence the title, Sinestesia: a meeting of opposites (warm/cold, steel/paint) that find harmony in unity.
Born from a desire to free art from traditional boundaries, the project extends my ongoing exploration of painting into a more tactile and interactive realm. Each piece invites the viewer to look, touch, rotate, and reflect—pushing passive observation into active participation, transforming encounter into experience.
The subjects—vividly colored animals of land, sea, and sky—appear as fleeting visions, creatures inhabiting the border between the real and the imagined. Among them stands Marilyn Monroe, a timeless icon of beauty and desire, gazing toward a new horizon like a pop divinity.
These works are not meant to hang on walls or be framed. They are meant to be handled, placed, and moved—free objects conceived to live openly in space, to engage with surfaces, to be touched and reoriented. Sinestesia invites a tactile and mobile experience of art, reinterpreting reality on a sheet of steel.
If your artwork could speak, what would it say about you?
“Thank you for allowing me to change—to be free lines and forms in constant motion.”
If your art had a playlist, what would be on it?
Stravinsky and Vivaldi.
How does your background influence your art?
My mother was Swedish, so I grew up loving Nordic fairy tales and children’s books—Hans Christian Andersen, Maurice Sendak—as well as American classics like The Wizard of Oz and especially Alice in Wonderland.
I’ve always been independent and adventurous, and I think my interactive works reflect that: stories of wonder, exploration, and freedom.
Tell us about a difficult moment in your creative journey. How did you overcome it?
I don’t usually struggle creatively—global events often spark my ideas. But there are moments of discouragement when art isn’t understood or sold, which can be frustrating for any artist. Still, I continue, because art, for me, isn’t just work—it’s a vocation.
Who are your favorite writers?
Isabel Allende
Gabriel García Márquez
Bruce Chatwin
Hermann Hesse
Who are your favorite filmmakers?
Matteo Garrone
Yorgos Lanthimos
Alissa Jung
NYAA Graduation Year: 1999
Instagram: @Camilla_Ancilotto
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