In this episode, we sit down with visual artist, photographer, filmmaker, and educator Liana Miuccio. Born in Rome and raised in New York, Liana is a dual citizen of Italy and the United States whose life and practice have moved between these two places. She teaches photography in Rome at Cornell University and Temple University, and her work explores identity, memory, migration, and the ways our everyday lives become part of the stories we tell about ourselves and one another.
This conversation went somewhere deep.
We talked about photography and teaching, about the joy of sharing what you love with students, and about continuing to make a life as an artist in a complicated contemporary art world. We talked about moving between Rome and the United States, following a creative practice across different chapters of a life, and figuring out what it means to live authentically when there may not be one prescribed version of what that life is supposed to look like.
And we talked about anger. We talked about the political climate, relationships, parenting, family, and some of the difficult choices that come with trying to live without regret. The conversation became intimate, vulnerable, funny, and at moments beautifully intense as we considered what it means to listen to yourself and actually do the things you believe you need to do.
Liana’s photographs can be beautiful, abstract, and deeply attentive to the everyday, and there is something of that same attentiveness in this conversation. We talked about making art, making choices, loving teaching, navigating change, and trying to build a life that feels like your own.
This is a conversation about what happens when art and life stop being separate questions, and we give ourselves permission to ask: What do I actually want my life to be?