Arno Rafael Minkkinen

Professor Minkkinen is a Finnish American photographer, worldwide lecturer, curator and essayist with over 100 solo shows and more than 200 group exhibitions at galleries, festivals, and museums in more than 25 American States and an equal number of countries around the world. He studied with Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind at Rhode Island School of Design, receiving his M.F.A. in photography in 1974. Seven monographs have been published: Frostbite (Morgan & Morgan, 1978), Waterline (Aperture, Marval, and Otava, 1994, Grand Prix du Livre at the 25th Recontres d’Arles), SAGA: The Journey of Arno Rafael Minkkinen, Thirty-Five Years of Photographs (Chronicle Books, 2005), Homework: The Finnish Photographs, 1973 to 2008 (Like Publishing, Ltd, 2008), and Balanced Equation (Lodima Press, 2010).

Minkkinen’s works are held in over 75 prominent museum and institutional collections worldwide, such as the Georges Pompidou Center and Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Musée de l’Élysée in Lausanne, the Contemporary Art Museum Kiasma in Helsinki, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. In 1993 the Finnish government bestowed on him the Order of the Lion First Class medal of knighthood for his curatorial service in support of Finnish Photography. He was recipient of the 2006 Finnish State Art Prize in Photography and awarded the 2013 Lucie Award at Carnegie Hall for Outstanding Achievement in Fine Art. His autobiographical, feature-length, fictional screenplay, The Rain House, received a financial support grant from the Finnish Film Foundation in 2011. A demo version of the film now in development was presented during the Dance on Camera Film Festival at Lincoln Center two years later. In 2015, Professor Minkkinen was honored with a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in photography.