About

Maria Bevilacqua is an accomplished photographer and a gifted artist whose work reflects her own life’s inspirations and challenges. Her provocative black and white photographs provide insight to landscapes existing in both reality and fantasy, past and present. Traveling extensively in Italy and the US Midwest, Maria provides an intuitive window to our earth’s changing landscape and our own changing lives.

Maria laid the foundation for her career in artistic photography by earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Drawing and Printmaking with a minor in Communications from Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 1982.She has held over a dozen exhibits since the early 1990’s and has been published several times since 1996. Her work is in the corporate collections of many local companies, including PPG Corporation, Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance, Centimark, Fore Systems, Mosites Construction, and Kolano Design.

Maria’s work has been reviewed by Thomas Robertello of ARTWORDS; Volume 1#3 in November 1996. He states, 

 “Maria Bevilacqua’s black and white photographs of Italian country scenes are an exercise in duality and transition. There is a brooding darkness matched with an illuminating sense of hope in each photo. Each piece is an unresolved locale, setting the stage for isolation, waiting for change…they fervently dominate the gallery with their strength and contemplative atmosphere.”

The Westmoreland Museum of American Art Exhibition Award was received in 1999 from the Associated Artist 89th Annual Exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This leads to her award-winning one-woman show which was garnered at the Associated Artist 89thAnnual Exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art in 1999.  The Westmoreland Museum of American Art Exhibition Award titled “Intimate Intersection: A Journey Home”featured black and white infrared images from Italy and the US Mid-west.  This work was praised and celebrated by Tribune Review Art Critic Graham Shearing dated March 30, 2001.

“...Bevilacqua has not taken photographs of America or Italy to add to somebody of patriotic or documentary imagery. Instead, and this is quite remarkable, these landscapes fall into the category of self-portraiture...They connote Bevilacqua’s sense of self-identity with the landscape she has chosen. That brings to mind the romanticism of German landscape painting of the early 19th century (Caspar David Friedrich, par excellence) and the landscape poetry of William Wordsworth in England. The artist and her subject become inseparable.”

Bevilacqua has garnered a full scholarship for a Master of Fine Arts in Photography at the University of South Florida in Tampa which is ongoing. She currently lives and works in Tampa, Florida where she is the Creative Director of her company Maria Bevilacqua Photography + Design.