Lynne Lawner is a photographer, as well as a poet and art historian. From May 12-19, 2011, she will be exhibiting her photos, curated by Fabio Castelli, at the MIA-Fair, Superstudio Più in Milan, Italy. Sixty recent poems, together with sixty photographs, inspired by a region of Switzerland where she spends her summers, have been arranged in an artist’s edition curated by Fabio Castelli and Francesco Dondina. She has been a presence in the St. Moritz Arts Masters Festival that has taken place during the month of August in the past few years.
Lawner has published seven books. Her volumes on art and culture include Lives of the Courtesans: Portraits of the Renaissance (Rizzoli Int’l., Rizzoli Milan), “I Modi”. The Sixteen Pleasures: An Album of the Italian Renaissance (Northwestern UP, also published Italy, Spain, Portugal), and Harlequin on the Moon: Commedia dell’Arte and the Visual Arts (Harry N. Abrams). She is the author of Letters from Prison of Antonio Gramsci (Harper’s and Jonathan Cape, repr. Farrar Straus-Noonday). Her volume of poetry translations Painted Fire: Selected Poems by Maria Luisa Spaziani appeared from Chelsea Press, NYC, in spring, 2010.
A graduate of Wellesley College with a PhD from Columbia University, Lawner has been a Henry Fellow at Cambridge University, three times a Fulbright Research Scholar in Italy, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, an American Association of University Women Fellow, a Fellow of the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (Villa “I Tatti”), a Radcliffe Institute Fellow, a Gladys Delmas Fellow in Venice, and a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art. She has been a Visiting Professor at UCLA and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She has lectured at Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Vassar, Connecticut College for Women, Indiana University, and many museums and institutions including Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, the Bard Center for the Decorative Arts, the Chicago Art Institute, the Dayton Art Institute, the Italian Cultural Institutes in New York, Chicago, and Washington, the New York Harvard Club, Yale Drama School, and the National Arts Club. For the Smithsonian Associates in Washington D. C., she devised a seminar a few years ago entitled “From Sans Souci to Schoenbrunn: Great Castles, Palaces, and Gardens of Central Europe”, showing her own photos.
Lawner’s articles on France, Italy, and Switzerland have appeared in The Sophisticated Traveler, New York Times Sunday Travel Section, and Food and Wine, accompanied by her photos. Her book reviews appear regularly in New York Times Book Review, Philadelphia Inquirer, Los Angeles Time Book Review, etc. She was contributing cultural editor of the national newspaper US/Italia Weekly. Her articles on art and exhibitions appear in Art News and other magazines. Catalogue essays about contemporary European and American artists have been published by Charta and other houses. Her translations have appeared in anthologies and journals such as Penguin Book of Women Poets, Modern European Poets, Yale Italian Poetry, Gradiva, Chelsea, Italian Poetry Journal.
Lawner is an active, voting member of the National Book Critics Circle; a member of the American PEN Center Translation Committee; and a former judge of the Modern Language Association non-fiction book prize. She has won prizes for her poetry, published by Atlantic Monthly Press and Harper’s (Wedding Night of A Nun; Triangle Dream. Among these are the Oscar Blumenthal Prize from Poetry magazine. She has been a resident in creative writing at Yaddo.
Lawner speaks five languages and has appeared frequently on television in both the United States and abroad. The novelist Umberto Eco presented her Lives of the Courtesans at USIS in Milan, and a festival dedicated to the Adriatic Sea made that book its theme, along with an art exhibition. Lawner, who lived many years in Rome, currently resides in Manhattan and divides her time between photography and a book tracing myths of the ancient world in postclassical Western art.