Faculty
The ITI faculty offer a wide variety of approaches to the written and visual arts. All are working contemporary artists who publish and exhibit their work in national and international contexts. Our faculty are dedicated to innovative approaches and traditions that value psychologically, culturally and politically engaged work.
Melissa Catanese lives in Pittsburgh and is founder of Spaces Corners, an artist-run photobook shop and project space. She most recently exhibited in Secondhand at Pier 24 Photography in San Francisco and in The Photographer’s Playspace at the Aperture Foundation in New York. She has been editing from a vast collection of over 20,000 photographs belonging to collector Peter J. Cohen for some years, and in 2012 she authored the celebrated photobook Dive Dark Dream Slow (The Ice Plant, 2012).
Ed Panar is a photographer and bookmaker currently residing in the forested hills and hollows of Pittsburgh. He has published numerous photobooks including: Nothing Changes if Nothing Changes (Spaces Corners & The Ice Plant, 2013), Salad Days (Gottlund Verlag, 2011), Animals That Saw Me (The Ice Plant, 2011), Same Difference (Gottlund Verlag, 2010), and Golden Palms (J&L Books, 2007). His photographs and books have been exhibited internationally at venues including: The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, Nofound Photofair, Paris, The New York Photography Festival and the Cleveland Museum of Art.
In 2014, Catanese and Panar were artists-in-residence at the Carnegie Museum of Art where they programmed The Sandbox: At Play With The Photobook. Together in 2016, they served as The Georgette and Richard Koopman Distinguished Chair in the Visual Arts at the Hartford Art School.