Venues & Recognition
Two decades in parallel: international juried exhibition, peer-reviewed scholarship, and civic practice embedded in real neighborhoods with real stakes. The tiers below make the case on their own.
Museums & Institutional Galleries
Five institutional venues in five years, one continuous body of work made with Sarah Nelson Wright.
South Street Seaport Museum
"Art at the BlueLine" — the premiere of Tomorrow's Sea, produced by the Waterfront Alliance with the South Street Seaport Museum and The Howard Hughes Corporation, installed at the future high-tide line of Lower Manhattan. Fontanilla returned that September for the museum's Climate Week NYC panel aboard the 1885 tall ship Wavertree.
Staten Island Museum
"Vulnerable Landscapes," curated by Rylee Eterginoso — Shifting Sands ran for seven months, opening on Earth Day. Museumgoers used the unattended wooden viewer in numbers.
Arsenal Gallery, NYC Parks
"ALTER ECO," curated by Ash Cortes — Tomorrow's Sea, which NYC Parks described as "a virtual reality empathy machine to foster connections between viewers and locations endangered by sea level rise." Included an Artist in Conversation event at the gallery.
BioBAT Art Space
"Water Stories," curated by Elena Soterakis, with partners including the Interstate Environmental Commission, the U.S. EPA, the University of Tokyo, NYU, and SUNY Downstate — Shifting Sands, in an eleven-month run capped by the two-day "Currents of Change" symposium, where Fontanilla and Wright spoke on the exhibiting-artists panel.
Hewitt Gallery of Art, Marymount Manhattan College
"Changing Landscapes: Research and Fieldwork," curated by Hallie Cohen with Adrienne Baxter Bell and Beth Shipley — the touring series' most recent chapter.
Queens Museum
"Chance Ecologies: Queens" (2016) — Hidden Vistas, plus the associated symposium — and "Open Engagement" (2018), whose five-borough programming ran alongside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Preceded by the museum's Studio in the Park residency (2016).
International & Juried
SIGGRAPH 2008 — "Slow Art"
Juried and peer-reviewed; S[tr]eam was selected from over 300 submitting artists and remains in the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Art Archive.
TechFest, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
One of Asia's largest science and technology festivals — 100,000+ annual visitors, reaching 2,300 colleges across India. Overlooked 2.0 was a featured installation and Fontanilla an invited speaker.
2017 Dubai Art Week — Woven Heritage
The international miniature printmaking exhibition, presented under the patronage of Her Excellency Sheikha Lubna Al Qasimi. The Acquaintance diptych entered Zayed University's permanent collection.
Nepal Art Council
A solo exhibition, Evanescence, at the national gallery — 28,000 square feet of the most central exhibition space in Kathmandu.
Cherry Creek Arts Festival / Arrow Five Years Out
An international jury awarded The Ethical Viewer: Perceptual Fog one of seven commissions from a field of 100+ entries spanning six countries; the work was shown to the festival's 350,000 visitors and entered Arrow's permanent collection.
Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology, Connecticut College
Juried biennial symposium proceedings: "Mutable Sculpture" (11th Biennial, 2008) and "Sear: A New Media Text Delivery System" (14th Biennial, 2014).
Peer-Reviewed Scholarship
Fontanilla, E., & Wright, S.N. "Empathy for Place." Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture, 2016. Peer-reviewed.
Silton, N.R., Fontanilla, E., Femia, M., & Rouse, K. "Employing Disability Simulations and Preliminary Virtual Reality Technology to Foster Cognitive and Affective Empathy towards Individuals with Disabilities." In Scientific Concepts behind Happiness, Kindness and Empathy in Contemporary Society, IGI Global, 2018. Peer-reviewed.
Fontanilla, E., Juszczak, M., & Messina, R. "Emergence of Manichean Political Rhetoric — Theoretical Modeling of Predictive Frameworks." International Journal of Pedagogy, Innovation and New Technologies, 7(2), 78–87, 2020. DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0014.6875. Peer-reviewed; cited by subsequent scholarship.
"Embodied Landscapes: Hidden Vistas + Tomorrow's Sea," with Sarah Nelson Wright. New Media Caucus Symposium ("Future Bodies"), VR Projects track, Virginia Tech, 2022. Peer-selected, in person.
Civic & Community Practice
SWIM Coalition — Getting to Zero in Dutch Kills
Listening to Dutch Kills — public art tied directly to an active environmental-justice campaign for swimmable, fishable waters around New York City.
UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art
"Artists and Post-Industrial Urban Wilderness" — community dialogue on the history of pollution and neglect that shaped the city's accidental nature.
Radiator Gallery · Loading Dock Gallery · Barrett Art Center · Sierra Arts Gallery
Sustained regional and community exhibition across the practice's twenty-year run — including Digitalia at Barrett (a national juried exhibition, selected from 900+ entries) and two solo shows at Sierra Arts.
Selected Press
NBC New York and Art Spiel covered Water Stories at the Brooklyn Army Terminal (2024) · Waterfront Alliance profiled Tomorrow's Sea at its BlueLine premiere (2022) · New Media Caucus featured Tomorrow's Sea at ALTER ECO (2024) · the Chance Ecologies years drew roughly twenty hits, including five Untapped Cities features, Curbed NY, Gothamist, Urban Omnibus, Art F City, and the Queens Courier (2015–2017) · Marymount Manhattan College News profiled Shifting Sands at the Staten Island Museum (2023).