Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani is an artist, urbanist and photographer. She is a native New Yorker and has a PhD in environmental psychology. She is a founder of Buscada, a studio that works with art, strategy and research to create spaces for dialogue about cities.
She wrote The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places (The MIT Press, 2024). The book has 288 pages. It combines photographs and writing shaped by resident-led “guided tours” in Brooklyn and Oakland. In it she introduces the idea of “placework”. She worked on film and digital, and often used a medium format film camera held at waist level.
Her earlier book is Contested City: Art and Public History as Mediation at New York’s Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (University of Iowa Press, 2019). It was a finalist and honoree for the MAS Brendan Gill Award.
She was a professor of urban studies and public art at the New School in New York for over a decade. She was also a postdoctoral fellow in visual culture at the International Center of Photography and a visiting fellow at the Centre for Urban Community Research, Goldsmiths, University of London.
