Marie Cieri | 2023 bio

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Marie Cieri founded The Arts Company of Cambridge, MA, in 1987 and has been its director ever since. She holds a B.A. in Journalism and Art from Rutgers University, an M.A. in Art History from the University of Southern California and a Ph.D. in Geography from Rutgers University. In her own current work, she often combines geographic techniques and perspectives with ones drawn from the arts and popular culture to create alternative representations of space and place with and for populations who generally have little access to the tools and forums of the public sphere. This approach has informed her more recent work with The Arts Company, including Artists in Context and the Artists' Prospectus for the Nation.

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Before becoming a geographer, Cieri had a diverse career as an arts producer, curator, consultant and writer. Beyond The Arts Company, her freelance work has included long-term cultural projects for The Rockefeller Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Kitchen in New York City, among many others.  She also has held professional positions at Walker Art Center, the New England Foundation for the Arts and two daily newspapers. Among her publications are two books, including Activists Speak Out: Reflections on the Pursuit of Change in America, co-authored and co-edited with Claire Peeps (2000, Palgrave/St. Martin’s Press), which contains activist profiles from a variety of fields, including the arts.

 

Cieri was an assistant professor of social geography and critical cartography at The Ohio State University from 2004 to 2008. From 2009 to 2016 she taught at Rhode Island School of Design, first as a critic in graduate studies and then as an instructor on the undergraduate level, in social, health and environmental geographies and research methodologies. She also was an instructor in social geography at the Cooper Union in New York City. Since becoming a geographer, she has continued as a consultant on a number of projects dealing with the arts, freedom of information and/or social justice. Her geographic/artistic work has been shown at art spaces in Brooklyn, NY; Boston; Providence, RI; and Los Angeles.

 

In 2025, Cieri will publish a website featuring her hybrid geographical/artistic practice, including a body of work entitled Irresolvable Geographies, which explores the idea that spaces and places are continually constructed and contested from a number of cultural, economic and political points of view. There will be a link to that website here.