Chris Diani

Biography

Chris Diani is a New England-based photographer and filmmaker. A graduate of Seattle Film Institute’s Total Immersion program, he earned a BFA in Photography from UMass Dartmouth and is currently an MFA candidate at School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, where he was awarded a 2024 Fung E.M Humanities Summer Fellowship. Chris's photographs are held in the archive of the Holt/Smithson Foundation and have been published in the Boston Globe, Advocate, Art in America Guide, and Options Magazine. “Colors of Pride,” his solo exhibition of portraits of members of the LGBTQ+ community, was shown at Gallery 244 in New Bedford, Massachusetts and he has exhibited in group shows at Mission Hill Gallery in Boston, Gallery X in New Bedford, ArtWorks Gallery in Ware, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts in Providence. His first feature film, the award-winning gay zombie comedy Creatures from the Pink Lagoon, has screened in over 30 cities worldwide and was released on DVD by Ariztical Entertainment.  

Artist Statement

I was ten years old when MTV hit the airwaves. My sensibilities were shaped by the sugar-high of pop culture in the neon-hued 1980s: music videos, Saturday morning cartoons, late-night creature features, pop art, Swatch watches, and Atari video games, and also the crushing lows of growing up gay in the midst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. It truly was the best of times and the worst of times.   

With I Just Want Them to Know That They Didn't Break Me, I combine photographic portraits of fellow queer men who lived through the 1980s, audio recordings of their stories of struggle and survival, archival photographs, vintage objects, and ephemera in an installation that explores my complicated feelings about that era. By looking to the past – a time of political instability and government indifference in the face of a terrifying disease – I hope to find clues on how to navigate the world of today. Ultimately, I strive to create work about the search for joy amidst the existential uncertainty of being gay in the 21st century.