Dario Calmese

Sitting at the nexus of art, fashion and academia, Dario Calmese is an artist, urbanist, director and brand consultant currently based in New York City. He received his master’s in photography from the School of Visual Arts and his bachelors in psychology at Rockhurst University in Kansas City. Classically trained in the performing arts, he uses his knowledge of movement, gesture, and psychology to create complex characters and narratives that explore history, race, class, and what it means to be human.

In 2020 he made history as the first Black photographer to shoot a cover for Vanity Fair in it’s 106-year history with his portrait of Oscar-winning actress, Viola Davis. 2020 also saw the launch of his widely-acclaimed podcast,The Institute of Black Imagination, featuring conversations from the Pool of Black Genius through the lens of design.

Calmese serves on the global advisory board for Estee Lauder Companies and is a professor at The New School’s Parson’s School of Design in New York City. He is currently a NYC Urban Design Forum Fellow and his show direction for the fashion brand Pyer Moss has been consistently hailed in Vogue and The New York Times as the “best show of Fashion Month.”

For more than 15 years, Calmese performed on stages both domestically and internationally, including a short stint on the soap opera, All My Children. His artistic works have been shown at Jack Shainman and Aperture galleries in New York, The Charles H. Wright Museum in Detroit, the National Museum of Turkmenistan (Artist Ambassador for the U.S. State Department), and are a part of the JP Morgan Chase Collection. His performance artworks have been shown at the Detroit Institute of Art and Symphony Space and Fridman Gallery in New York City. His curatorial debut, Fashioning the Black Body (2019), interrogated the ways in which Black artists like Kehinde Wiley, Mickalene Thomas, Jacolby Satterwhite, and Hank Willis Thomas engaged with the fashion object in their work.

His writing has been featured in The Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, Business of Fashion, and in “Willi Smith: Street Couture” for the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, published by Rizzoli in 2020. Other clients include: The New York Times, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Esquire, Numero Berlin, Clinique, Beyoncé, The Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA), The Plaza Hotel and New York University.