Bianca Sturchio & riel Sturchio
"before the last lilac blooms” is a collaborative decade-plus film photography project between twin siblings Bianca Sturchio (she/her), who lives in Portland, Maine, and riel Sturchio (they/she), who lives in Iowa City, Iowa. riel is queer and someone who lives with chronic illness, and Bianca is queer and disabled. The collaborators utilize photography to provoke and examine the vulnerability they experience from their unique manifestations of queer identity, illness, and disability. Through ambiguously cropped images of the body, visual metaphors, and documented and constructed scenes, they explore and convey celebratory, challenging, and often invisible aspects within the intimate world-building they share, imagine, and create. This award will allow them to collaborate, construct new images, and explore new approaches to image-making.
