ASH MARINACCIO

Ash Marinaccio, Ph.D., is a multidisciplinary documentarian and visual storyteller working across photography, theatre, and film. Her photographic practice is rooted in documentary storytelling and a deep belief in the power of images to witness, preserve, and make meaning from the lives of people and communities. She is particularly interested in the spaces where personal stories intersect with larger social and political systems and histories and where questions of identity, belonging, conflict, grief, labor, sexuality, illness, imagination, and resistance become visible.

Ash approaches photography as a collaborative practice and a form of relationship-building. She works alongside the people and communities she photographs, creating images that honor their agency, complexity, and lived experience. Her work is often concerned with what photographs can hold: memory, testimony, ritual, intimacy, and the traces of histories that might otherwise disappear. She is especially interested in photography as a living archive and preserving what communities continue to create, imagine, and carry forward.

Her work has taken her throughout the United States and internationally, including Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, Taiwan, Thailand, Syria, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Across these contexts, she has photographed artists, activists, cultural workers, young people, and communities navigating conflict, displacement, inequality, and social change.

Ash is the founder of DocBloc Projects, an interdisciplinary cultural organization bringing documentary artists together through performance, journalism, and visual storytelling. She is also the founding Artistic Director of Girl Be Heard, a United Nations-recognized NGO. Her work has received the Lucille Lortel Visionary Award, a Drama League Residency, and fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, NY Public Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has been named one of Culture Trip’s “50 Women in Theatre You Should Know” and is a two-time TEDx speaker.

Ash holds an M.A. in Performance Studies from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and a Ph.D. in Theatre and Performance from The Graduate Center, CUNY.

Visit ashmarinaccio.com to view her nonfiction theatre work and director portfolio.