About
Nicholas Rispoli is a visual artist, arts educator, one-time novelist, and would-be singer. He works across drawing, collage, ceramic sculpture, etching, and writing - sometimes separately, sometimes all at once, and sometimes under pen names. He invites viewers to engage with his figures, which investigate human embodiment, life beyond our bodies, and the pursuit of liberation from inherited man-made myths and prescriptions - what he calls invasions.
Nicholas holds a BFA in Studio Art from Manhattanville College and an MFA in Sculpture from the New York Academy of Art. His work has been published in OUT Magazine and Evergreen Review, and he has presented solo exhibitions with Paul Calendrillo in New York City (Transmutation and Conversations with Strangers). His pieces have also appeared in numerous group shows, including Understory Gallery in Cleveland, the Southern Graphics Council International Conference (SGCI) in Seattle, and the Squirts Festival at La MaMa Theater in New York as part of Mariam Bazeed’s play, Peace Camp Org.
He has completed artist residencies at La Escuela de Diseño de Altos de Chavón in the Dominican Republic, where he later returned to teach ceramic sculpture, and at HANGAR -- Center of Artistic Research in Lisbon, Portugal. In 2021, he deepened a collaboration with writer and performer Mariam Bazeed through the Visual Muze Residency, supported by the West Harlem Art Fund, to develop post-mortem family vacation.
Committed to community arts and education, Nicholas partnered with Window Studio in Brooklyn to lead programming, a project that received Brooklyn Arts Council grants for local initiatives. He has taught at Pace University, New York Academy of Art, and Marymount Manhattan College - Bedford Hills College Program. He also served as Assistant Artistic Director of the New York State Summer School of the Arts (NYSSSA), guiding a statewide visual arts intensive for high school artists.
His drawings have often been described as idiosyncratic, and he’s not sure if it’s a compliment or total diss - but he keeps making them anyway. He maintains the hopeless mission to master the Arabic language and to make large-scale sculptures again one day.