Michael Ricciardi
Since 2003
Works in Seattle United States of America

PORTFOLIO (3)
BIO
BIOGRAPHY for Michael Ricciardi

Michael Ricciardi is an Arts & Sciences educator, writer/poet, and multi-media artist living in Seattle, Washington. During his teens and through his mid twenties, Michael worked professionally as a sleight-of-hand artist/illusionist.

Since then, he has worked as an arts and sciences reporter/photographer/interviewer, a natural science instructor, and a field research assistant for an entomologist. His first Arts grant, in 1987, was to produce the documentary 'The Jones River, A Natural History, which became a critical piece of evidence in an on-going water rights litigation). He has interviewed several renowned scientists, including physicist Brian Greene (author of The Elegant Universe), cosmologist Paul Steinhardt (Princeton), and Nobel Laureate (1978, Chemistry) Ilya Prigogine (author of Order Out of Chaos).

As a poet, Michael has been giving spoken word performances (solo and with musicians) since 1991 and has been featured at readings, clubs, and festivals from Cambridge, MA, to Vancouver, B.C., including the Seattle Poetry Festival (1997, '98, 2001), The Collaborative Poetics Festival (Portland, OR, 2003), Bumbershoot (2001), and (as a member of the Seattle National Poetry Slam Team) the National Poetry Slam (Austin, TX, 1998). He sometimes performs as chaosmosis, a collaborative performance project of spoken word, video, and music, with local sound artist/composer Ffej.

Ricciardi's writing (non-fiction, poetry, short fiction/satire) has been published by various magazines and journals (print and digital) including: Mysteries Magazine, Space Lifestyle Magazine, The Cosmos Review, The Exquisite Corpse, Lungfull, Scopes, Farmhouse Magazine, The Surface, Would That It Were, Tattoo Highway, and What We Now Know, with one illustrated poetry chapbook, Emergeometry, published by Warm Mango Press (2001).

Michael is also an award winning video artist (for 'video poetry') and has exhibited his video art internationally. His most recent video, 'My Name is HAM' (an imagined memoir of the first chimp in space), was selected for screening and premiered at Yuri's Night Bay Area 2008, an annual "party for space" held that year at NASA Ames Research Center (Mountainview, CA).

In 2002 and 2003, Michael was the recipient (with Eleventh Hour Prods.) of an Paul G. Allen Foundation for the Arts grant to produce/curate Future For WORD (www.futureforword.org), a special exhibition of visual, experimental, and new media poetry (Seattle Poetry Festival, 2002, Bumbershoot, 2003).

In May, 2004, Michael presented a paper (‘The Exquisite Cosmonaut ~ Towards a Collaborative Poetics in Space’) and short lecture at ESTEC (Noordvijk, NL) for the ESA/LEONARDO 7th Meeting on Space and the Arts.

He is the co-designer (with Peter Oppenheimer) of the Dynamic Visual Poetry Landscape System (DVPLS), a virtual/new media fusion of spoken, written, and visual poetry.

Michael Ricciardi's work may be viewed at www.chaosmosis.net