Rose Marasco (born December 25, 1948), is an American photographer. She is considered to be "perhaps Maine’s most prolific photographer,” living and working there since 1979.
After leaving VSW, Marasco "initiated the photography program at Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, NY, establishing the curriculum, darkrooms, & studios, and teaching both black & white and color" from 1974 to 1979. Marasco moved to Maine in 1979 for a position at the University of Southern Maine, where she taught photography for 35 years, retiring as Distinguished Professor Emeritus in 2014.
Artistic career
Marasco has been an exhibited artist since 1971 with twenty-eight solo shows and more than eighty group shows. Marasco’s photographs are included in public collections of distinction including at the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College, the New York Public Library Photography Collection, the Portland Museum of Art, and the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, among others. She has lectured about her work at Harvard University, Parsons School of Design, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, Bowdoin College, Maine College of Art, and many other institutions in the United States.
In 2015 the Portland Museum of Art mounted a major retrospective, called index, of Marasco's work, organized by PMA Chief Curator Jessica May. Describing her method in a review of the exhibition, critic John Yau wrote, “It seems to me that Marasco deserves both a full-sized monograph and to be better known. She is more than Maine’s most prolific photographer.” In 2016 Marasco was awarded the Maine Women's Fund Sarah Orne Jewett Award, given to "a Maine woman who exhibits the attributes of the women in Jewett’s works of fiction: true grit, independence, courage, humor and discipline," and in 2005, received the Excellence in Photographic Teaching Award from Santa Fe Center for Photography New Mexico.
Select solo exhibitions
2024 My Lynne Drexlers, Moss Galleries, Falmouth, Maine
2024 Diffusions #1, OSMOS Station, Stamford, New York
2008 The Invented Photograph. Universite de Bretagne Occidentale, Brest, France
2004 Domestic Objects: Past and Presence, University of Southern Maine, and traveled to Southwest Harbor Public Library, University of Maine Museum of Art, Bangor, and University of Maine at Farmington
