Marie Bismonte makes work about how people survive—and what survival costs. Based in the Bronx, she works across writing, photography, and handmade books, returning to the same questions over years: How do consciousness and memory function under pressure? What gets lost in the gaps between languages, countries, institutions?

Her practice mirrors how survival actually works—not linear progress but recursive patterns, the same wounds revisited until they yield new understanding. Projects develop over years: annual portrait series tracking identity formation, hand-bound books exploring documentation as survival tool, stories that spiral through trauma and institutional violence. Each return reveals something previously invisible.

Currently she’s working on multi-year portrait series and conceptual zines that examine the relationship between documenting experience and creating physical objects as acts of meaning-making. Through these longitudinal investigations, she tracks how people create connection despite systems designed to separate them.

Her work has been published internationally and exhibited in the Philippines, Italy, France, and the United States.