Past Resident

Santina Amato

Santina Amato is an interdisciplinary artist whose work addresses the basic notion of the intimate body, especially the female body. She was born in Australia to Italian immigrants and has lived and worked in the USA since 2010. She received an MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017.

“My attraction to the materiality of dough relates back to my childhood growing up within an immigrant Italian household in Australia, where dough was no foreign matter and gender roles were clearly in place.  My first memory and experience of femininity and the power of creation (and potentially female desire) was watching my mother knead this soft, white, voluptuous material. Folding it over and onto itself, pushing her whole body towards it – back and forth, back and forth­ – while steering the dough with her hands, she transformed it from flour and water into our existence as a living organism, to be consumed by our bodies, via our mouths.”