Michael Anthony Ricciardi is a multidisciplinary artist, published poet and writer, designer, and inventor based in Seattle, Washington. With a creative career spanning more than four decades, Ricciardi has worked across a range of media including photography, video-poetry, experimental media, and hybrid digital arts, all unified by his passion for exploration and storytelling.

Since 1985, he has been actively exhibiting his photo-art across the United States, earning awards and honors for both black-and-white and color photography. His international exhibition record began in 2022 with shows in Athens, Rome, and Naples, where he earned 2nd place in the 8th Fotosophia Competition, part of the Filosophia (‘Bellezza’) Festival of Ischia-Naples (Italy).

Ricciardi has also been producing short video works since 1986, with his video-poetry and video-art screened extensively throughout the U.S. in cities such as San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Seattle, Portland, Athens (GA), and Taos (NM), as well as internationally in Vancouver (Canada), Buenos Aires (Argentina), Athens (Greece), and Vienna (Austria).

In 2004, Ricciardi became the first poet selected to present at the prestigious 7th Leonardo Meeting on Space and the Arts at ESTEC (European Space Research and Technology Centre) in the Netherlands, where he delivered his paper The Exquisite Cosmonaut – Towards a Collaborative Poetics in Space.

Throughout his career, Ricciardi has received multiple grants and awards, including two New Technology Grants from the Paul G. Allen Foundation for the Arts (2002, 2003). These supported the creation of Future ForWORD—the first-ever exhibition of new media, experimental, and visual poetics, presented at the Seattle Poetry Festival and the Bumbershoot Arts Festival. A key innovation of this exhibition was a one-of-a-kind speech recognition-based Virtual Environment for creating kinetic visual poetry, co-designed with Peter Oppenheimer.

Further linking his work to space exploration, in 2017 Ricciardi’s short hybrid bio-doc/poetry-video A Dream of Space (2) was selected as public art aboard NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft mission to asteroid Bennu. Continuing his exploration of creative challenges beyond Earth, his microgravity knot-tying game, Zero-Gordian, was one of five winning designs in the inaugural #EqualSpace Space Games Challenge (Space Games Federation, 2022).

Today, Michael Anthony Ricciardi continues to push creative boundaries through his experimental photo-composite, animated, and hybrid (human + AI) artworks. Actively exhibiting wherever new ideas and adventurous spirits are welcome, his practice remains rooted in innovation, interdisciplinarity, and a constant search for new ways to connect art, science, and human imagination. Learn more here.