BIOGRAPHY

Marc Dennis is an American artist known for his hyper realistic and strikingly detailed paintings and drawings of subtly staged and slightly voyeuristic images of contemporary American culture. Interested in the transformative possibilities of familiar artistic tropes and iconic images, Dennis explores the charged subjects of beauty, pleasure, and power. 

Born in 1969 in Danvers, Massachusetts, he holds a BFA from Tyler School of Art, and MFA from The University of Texas at Austin. His works are in numerous private and public international collections, including those of The Neuberger Berman Collection, New York; The Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin; The Springfield Museum of Art, Ohio, and the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California. Marc is also currently co-producing “Mirrors,” a six-channel video installation project on the Holocaust as well as a short film on the subject of clandestine art made by a prisoner inside a Nazi concentration camp.  

In addition to being an artist, Marc is also a full time tenured professor of art at Elmira College where he teaches all levels of painting and drawing including a very unique off-campus course based in New York City, called “Project Dumbo,” where select students live and work for one month together in a loft in Brooklyn to experience an all-encompassing art course equipping them with the necessary artistic, conceptual and communicative skills in preparation for a career in the arts. He is also an independent Holocaust scholar on the subject of clandestine art made by prisoners inside Nazi concentration camps, a filmmaker, a blogger for an NPR hosted affiliate, and one of the nation’s leading entomophagists (someone who eats bugs).