Costanza Santilli

Costanza is a fine art photographer and researcher currently undertaking a practice-based PhD in photography at the University of Brighton. Her research is concerned with notions of place and belonging while focusing on contemporary issues of rural landscape and environmental ideas of nature. Engaging with the English landscape from an outsider's point of view, her work investigates the dynamics that shape our relationship with place and explores how creative inquiry—through original aesthetic and philosophical methodologies—can prompt new ways of imagining and representing rurality as a valuable social and environmental space while reconsidering our relationship to nature.

Costanza's embodied approach, both in the field and the darkroom, results in a self-reflexive practice that—connecting meaning to processes—develops a performative idea of the photographic gesture able to conjure the partial and selective mechanisms of (personal and collective) memory and the invisible, emotional ties that connect people with places.

Costanza holds a master's in History of Art and Art-world practice: Modern and Contemporary Art from the University of Glasgow and a bachelor's degree in Science for the Conservation-Restoration of Cultural Heritage from the University of Bologna.

Costanza is a recipient of the Urbanautica Institute Award 2023 in the category of Anthropology and Territory.