Susan Cianciolo’s participatory practice is inspired by fashion, craft and domestic life. Her sculptures, drawings, and costumes are meaningful units of ephemera drawn from her life and work – the difference between the two, for Cianciolo, has always been wilfully eschewed. Her recent exhibitions have consisted of a series of filled boxes that Cianciolo terms ​‘kits’ - a prototypical format of her work, which are assemblages of items from her archives that are reformulated as a tool-box cum biographical archive to be sifted through by visitors. In other projects, she has converted the space of a gallery into a working restaurant, its menus and table settings the props for an extended collective performance. Like her larger, participatory environments, Cianciolo’s sculptural works, tapestries, and drawings fold in disparate elements from the world outside, such as pressed flowers, recipes, and glitter.

In the way she so naturally makes the quotidian details of her life her work, in vice versa, Cianciolo’s recent artistic output is made with the same spirit that characterised the many physical forms her work has taken since the beginning of her career as a fashion designer in the mid 1990s. Between 1995 and 2001, working under her label run, she created eleven ranges of hand-made, unique garments and displayed them in runway shows that incorporated collaborations between music, film, fashion, performance and hospitality. The term ​‘collection’ for Cianciolo’s run was as much about a collection of people, or of talents, as it was about the release of a collection every season. This expansive, collective approach has persisted in her work, which is now shown in museums and galleries, as much as through live performances, printed publications, and workshops.

Susan Cianciolo was born in 1969 in Providence, Rhode Island, and lives and works in New York. Between 1995 and 2001, she created eleven ‘runs’ of handmade, unique garments under her label RUN, which at one time was alternatively incarnated as a popup restaurant. Her presentations blended fashion with music, film, performance, and food. Cianciolo has held academic appointments at Städelschule, Parsons School of Design, Yale School of Art and NYU Steinhardt. Since 2013, she has been Assistant Professor of Fashion Design at Pratt Institute. Her work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at The Community Centre, Pantin (2022); the Lumber Room, Portland (2021); South London Gallery (2019); Yale Union, Portland (2016); and 365 S. Mission Road, Los Angeles (2016). Her participation in the 2017 Whitney Biennial saw the reprisal of RUN Restaurant as Run Restaurant Untitled, a three-day installation and gastronomic event.