Tony Chirinos
Finalist
Tony Chirinos (born Venezuela; lives Miami, FL) is a documentary-style artist. He has an MFA from Columbia University, New York, NY. Trained as a biomedical photographer in 1985 at Miami Children’s Hospital, he went on to create the Medical Photography department at Baptist Health Systems in 1989. His career spans over forty years, exploring the themes of mortality and fragility. Chirinos’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the third Bronx Latin American Art Biennial and the Review Santa Fe Photo Symposia in 2012, 2018 and 2019. His work is held in the collections of the University of Colorado Boulder; Cuban Heritage Collection at the University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Mount Sinai Medical Center, New York, NY; Candela Collection, Richmond, VA; Photographic Center Northwest, Seattle, WA; Light Work, Syracuse, NY; and Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, Tucson, among others. Chirinos is a recipient of awards and grants including the Callanan Excellence in Teaching Award, Green Space Miami Grant, as well as a William Talbott Hillman Foundation Grant for his monograph The Precipice. He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and South Florida Cultural Consortium. His photographs have been featured in the British Journal of Photography, Business Insider, Daily Mail, Edge of Humanity Magazine, Fotofilmic, Photo-eye, Slate and The Washington Post, among others. Chirinos has been Professor of Photography at Miami Dade College since 2003.