Laura Jean Zito

Laura Jean Zito alternates between photography and painting, symbolically using color and composition to heighten charged moments, and invoking a Caravaggio sense of filmic action.

She worked as NBC Network News Graphic Artist and Photographer, and as feature films still photographer on several major films, including the hip-hop classic “Breakin’ “. She founded and ran Fotoforum, a street level NYC photography gallery at 575 5th Avenue and 47th St., for female photographers, naming the gallery Fotoforum after the original German gallery in Frankfurt. She curated “Make it Big, Make It Great, Make it Class,” an art show for reunioning Harvard classmates, “Relief,” at Adam Lubelski’s NYC Broadway Gallery, and “Art of the Garden,” a PA library exhibition of 100 artists and 250 works.

Recent exhibits include 2019 solo shows at the Ballina Arts Centre, and the Museum of Country Life’s Courtyard Gallery, both in County Mayo; group shows, “Ireland in Frame,” in 2020, by the Irish Embassy in Berlin, as one of six Irish Street Photographers and “Landscape and Nature” at the Boyle Arts Festival in 2022 with two other photographers. She has many Best in Shows, First Prizes and Purchase Prizes from Museums and art competitions, such as Grand Prize in the Nikon Photo Contest International, “Best in Show” and “Best Photograph” at the annual all-media “Art of the State” at the State Museum of Pennsylvania and Purchase Prizes at the AKC Museum of the Dog in NYC and the James A. Michener Museum in Doylestown, PA. In 2021 she won a place in “Street Photography Around the World” at the Los Angeles Center for Photography, All About Photo’s “Streets” competition, and was published in their 22nd issue, “Streets,” and on the “In the Frame” page for the month of May in “Totally Dublin,” and In a Californian Art Magazine, “Catamaran”, with photos from the Holy Land to accompany a short story, “Sunbirds.”. In 2022, she won the Third Prize in The International Color Awards in Photojournalism and was published in their Winners Book and Winners Video and in “Edge of Humanity” magazine online. In 2023 she was shortlisted for the Belfast Photo Festival Open Submission.