Anna Maria Antoinette D'Addario is an Italian Australian artist whose interdisciplinary practice spans photography, artist books, installation, archival research and expanded documentary. Using photographic and material processes, she explores how emotional connection to place, memory and landscape are shaped through personal and collective histories, reconsidering how these are remembered, inherited and transmitted across generations.
Working across photography, artist books, text, collage, threadwork and counter-mapping, D'Addario draws on family and public archives, approaching photographs, maps, written fragments and found materials whose meanings are continually reconsidered through sequencing, juxtaposition and material intervention. Her work approaches photography as a material practice through which images, objects and documents are reordered, interrupted and brought into relation. Artist books occupy a central position within her practice, functioning as material and spatial forms that frequently extend into installation and site-responsive contexts.Examining how absence, movement, inheritance and historical experience shape understandings of place and belonging and non-belonging, she creates works in which multiple histories, temporalities and lived experiences coexist and entangle. Fragmentation, withholding and material transformation are integral to her methodology, inviting viewers to negotiate relationships between image, archive and place, while considering how we remember the past and understand our histories.
She holds a Master of Fine Arts from the Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, and is currently undertaking a PhD in Fine Art at Monash University. Her doctoral research develops mnemonic atlases as an expanded documentary methodology for exploring counter-memory through photography, bookwork, archival research and situated and material practice.
D'Addario's work has received international recognition, including the 2019 Photolux Photobook Award for Farewell Angelina, which led to the publication of her second artist book, Deep in their Roots, All Flowers Keep the Light, by ceiba Editions (Italy). Her work has been exhibited and published internationally and is held in public and private collections, including the National Library of Australia, the State Libraries of New South Wales and Queensland, the Biblioteca Piccolomini (Siena), the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze. Alongside her artistic practice, D'Addario contributes to contemporary photographic culture through editorial, curatorial and educational work. She has been a regular contributor to The New York Times and has worked as a curator, photo editor and educator, contributing to exhibitions, festivals, publishing and collaborative projects that support contemporary photographic practice.
As an artist living and practicing in Australia, Anna acknowledges the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the first inhabitants of Country and the traditional custodians of the lands where she lives, learns and works. She recognises that sovereignty was never ceded.