I am a photographer and artist. I take photographs of people, places and things that I believe are in the process of changing. I want to photograph true and unique American landscapes and document these scenes before they change and it's too late.

I grew up in Los Angeles and moved to Washington, DC in 1981 at age sixteen. In 1985 I graduated from the Corcoran College of Art with a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in Graphic Design. The Washington, DC punk/alternative music community of the early 1980s greatly influenced my artistic and photographic styles, lending an energy to my work that was drawn from—and pointed toward—the "DIY" (do it yourself) ethic. By natural progression, I wanted to create my own art "scene", or contribute to a community in the same way that the local music scene had.

In 1986 I spent six months in San Francisco working on the punk music magazine Maximum Rock 'n' Roll, where my ideas were distilled even further. While in San Francisco, I decided to return to the East Coast and document the punk music scene there. Once back in Washington, DC, I established my own publishing company and produced the book Banned in DC, a collection of stories and photographs that I put together with the help of Leslie Clague and Sharon Cheslow. Banned in DC was published in 1988; since then, I have sold over 13,000 copies.

While working on Banned in DC, I began to book bands, art, performance art and musicals at a local alternative arts venue called d.c. space. For six years, I promoted shows featuring a wide variety of artists such as performance artist Karen Finley, jazz musician Don Cherry, rock band Big Black, and many other artists from around the country. With d.c. space serving as a platform for art and music, I realized how such an intimate, non-traditional outlet for shows and performances could be important for a community.

In 1988, I sensed a turning point in the local music scene, so I decided to document that change by recording a number of bands. I subsequently produced and manufactured a live album called The Pre-Moon Syndrome Post Summer of Noise, the proceeds of which were donated to a local free medical clinic.

During this time, I was also working at Dischord Records, doing advertising and promotions at this influential DC based record/CD label. I worked at Dischord until 2002.

Around 1993 I dove avidly into photography after documenting the project DC Musicians with their Cars for Speed Kills magazine. It was at this point that I decided that what much of what I had learned in school had actually restricted my imagination, so I decided to teach myself the rudiments of color and black and white photography. I decided to apply to my art projects the same DIY aesthetics of the music shows I had promoted at d.c. space, booking openings in spaces where art wasn’t traditionally shown. Many of my early shows included performance art, storytelling, and spontaneous music performances, which created a multi-media experience that combined the energetic elements of live performances with the visual energy of my photographs.

Since those early days, my photographs have been shown all over the world (including the DC Musicians with their Cars series, a series of 35mm black and white landscapes, and a series of color half-frames). Because of the flexibility of my job at Dischord Records, I was able to take my photographs "on tour”, organizing month-long shows in galleries and other spaces and traveling to or from each show, all the while continuing to photograph. My friend Pat Graham and I collaborated on these tours—the photos were shipped to each venue in advance, then I or another artist would take turns hanging or dismantling the show. I did all the promotional work for these tours, which ran from 1997 to 2000.

In May, 1999, I did a solo show featuring 80 framed works at Milky World Gallery in Seattle, Washington. Later that year, I became interested in the European ideal of the American landscape, so I organized an international tour of the Seattle show and reprinted my photographs in a larger format. I brought these photos in a box, unframed, to five European locations. Also that year, I was selected for the Pennsylvania Photo Review competition.

In 2000 I was the winner of Arlington County's Juror Award, Summer Salon.

While I have continued to do roughly one solo show a year, around 2001 I started organizing groups shows. I curated and organized the Four Hour Art Sale and Self Serve Auction—where artists hung their work, after which a silent auction was held. After four hours, the artists collected the money for their art, and the buyers took the works home. By this point, I had invested in a large letterpress, and I was able to make promotional posters to go alongside the shows. These events were conceived to support artists and to make art more accessible to the people, two factors I've always found important.

In 2001 I organized the launch party for a set of postcards of my work that I had designed and manufactured, Box of Ice Boxes. For the opening, I printed my photographs in 11X14 format and displayed them on the side of a building that faced an alley and hosted my first drive-through art show.

In 2002 I was selected as Artist in Residence at Harper's Ferry National Park.

In 2002/03, I quit my job at Dischord Records and moved south to be an outreach student at Auburn University’s Rural Studio in Newbern, Alabama. There, I photographed a world filled with drastic contrasts: poverty and excess, desperation and love, and the lush, raped, rugged landscape that is the backdrop for many Alabaman lives. With the help of grants from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, I designed and built an organic vegetable stand that incorporated the work of a regional folk artist with white oak baskets made by a local woman, and letter-pressed posters promoting farmer's markets in the area.

In July 2003 I was chosen to lecture on this project and the Rural Studio Outreach program at the Smithsonian's Cooper Hewitt Summer Design Institute. Elements of my work were shown in the Sambo Mockbee/Rural Studio exhibit that debuted in the fall of 2003 at the Birmingham Museum of Art and continued to tour the world wide. Later, I presented this lecture at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.

While at the Rural Studio, I created two postcard sets —a series of color half-frame, deckle-edged cards of Alabama landscapes, and a set documenting Rural Studio project sites. Like Box of Ice Boxes, these postcard sets are very personal documents of my American vision. They are also part of the continuing network of art communities that I seek to find and create. My postcards have become like graffiti tags, or a patchwork quilt depicting the places I have been. People find my postcards in the nooks and crannies of the world and mail them to me, along with messages explaining where and when they found them.

My postcards —which I consider to be an example of accessible art, can be seen in larger venues like The New Museum in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Colette in Paris, and Scalo in Zurich, as well as smaller book stores, art/gallery stores, and music stores around the world.

In 2004 I won a grant from Arlington County, Virginia to document bluegrass/old time musicians who met in an area park to jam twice a month. This project, which incorporated framed photos along with digital field recordings, was on display in a gallery in Arlington County and was also shown in Staunton Virginia the following year. This exhibition is now part of the permanent art collection of Arlington County, and is on display in one of its municipal buildings.

In March 2004 my photographs were included in a show called Beautiful Losers, which opened at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, continued on to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and toured the world until its last show in Madrid, Spain in early 2009. Beautiful Losers encompasses work by artists that I befriended in the early '90s. Although we all lived and worked in different communities across the United States, we had many things in common—we have all worked largely in isolation, and outside societies' perception of art.

After my time at the Rural Studio, I took a couple turns in my own work and life. I started to explore installations of my work as opposed to traditional photo shows, I became involved in the “old-time” music scene and have learned to play banjo, and I became the Director of a 5,000 square foot gallery in Arlington County, Virginia called the Ellipse Arts Center.

With the exhibit Ice Worms and Plate Lunch, at 96 Gillespie in London, I started working on installing work specific to a space. In this exhibit that I both curated and participated in, were 12 half-frame color photographs taken in Alabama and printed in London. Each photograph was installed in conjunction with an object one could buy in a store in Alabama. I used the original wood paneling from the walls of the gallery (similar to those found in Alabama) and used it to make shelves to hold the photographs. Attached to each shelf was another shelf for the corresponding object. Despite its simplicity, this idea was a departure from my previous work, and I was able to use my building skills in the exhibit.

Cynthia Connolly Photogs was an exhibit featuring over 200 photographs of Alabama installed to resemble a local store one might find in Alabama, in which the objects for sale were the framed photographs that stood alone on the shelves, divided into categories like “People”, “Buildings”, “Nature” and “Signs”.

See All Fifteen at Once was another exhibit that had an installed element about Alabama, complete with plans for touring the exhibit.

Being the Director and Curator of Arlington County’s Ellipse Arts Center has provided me the opportunity to curate many shows. These shows are extensions of my interest in my own work as an artist. One exhibit titled You Are Here displayed four mid-Atlantic artists who use maps in their work. Another exhibit, The Thread as the Line, which opened in 2008, explained a movement of contemporary sewn art. While I was traveling around selling postcards, I noticed, beginning in 2001, that many artists were sewing their work together and doing embroidery on canvas to create “paintings”. Although I could not be in this exhibit, I myself was experimenting with a similar medium. I was letterpressing layers of colors and words onto my photos, and I then cut them apart and sewed them back together in different ways. I sewed portions of my photographs to create new images.

I see the process of curation as something that contributes to my own work, and I will eventually create my own exhibits inspired by those I curated at the Ellipse Arts Center.

After mid 2001, I shifted the focus of my photography from the American West to the East and South. Going to the Rural Studio provided a crash course on the South and also provided me a greater understanding about the region where I live. After Alabama, I thought it might be nice to live in southwest Virginia, which is closer to home, and similar to (yet not) Alabama. I never quite moved there; I ended up in Arlington again and began dating a guy in Blacksburg, VA who now provides me my second home away from home. The five-hour drive south from Arlington to Blacksburg offers me many routes to seek and find more opportunities for photography. In 2007 a photo essay and article titled Punks Who Play Old Time —the photographs were shot primarily at Clifftop, West Virginia —was published in Fretboard Journal.

More recently, I have conducted workshops including a talk on my experience at the Rural Studio at the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt in New York and at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, A letterpress workshop at the Andy Warhol Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, and finally a workshop in Madrid Spain on “How to Take Beautiful Pictures of Nothing”.

My work has been printed in many magazines and books including Art in America, Index Magazine, Fretboard Journal, Anthem, Paper Magazine, Emigre, Jane Magazine, YM, 7X7 San Francisco, After Hours, Tokion's "disobedients" (art) issue, Bust Magazine, Gargoyle Literary Magazine, Tape Op, Heckler, Blue, The Photo Review, The Washington Post, Washington City Paper, Great God Pan, Speed Kills, Concussion, Cool Beans, Double Negative, and Punk Planet; and such books as The Rolling Stone Book of Women in Rock, Our Band Could be Your Life, Declaration of Independents, Foder's Rock 'n' Roll Traveler, USA, Dance of Days, Hitori-"altogether one", from Japan, Lengths and Breaths with Lee Ranaldo, and the book in conjunction with the exhibit Beautiful Losers.

Presently, I live in Arlington County, Virginia, where I am the Director for the Ellipse Arts Center, spend some time further south, play the banjo, and work with my letterpress. I continue to create my own exhibits from my ever-growing collection of photographs in the full and half-frame 35mm format.