Melissa Ianniello (Naples, 1991) is a documentary photographer based in Bologna, Italy. After graduating in Philosophy, she studied documentary photography at Spazio Labo', in Bologna, including participating in its international educational program, “Photo Workshop New York”, in Brooklyn.
In 2018 she began her first long-term project, Wish it Was a Coming Out, about the taboo in Italy surrounding elderly homosexual people. In 2020, she created M. G. I. A. B., a story about trans identity. In the same year, she was selected as a student for the XXXIII Eddie Adams Workshop. Above all, in that year, she was hospitalized because of health problems: from this intimate and deep experience, she created the project That Month, still unpublished in 2024 because she needed time to process the content of that work. In 2022, her first solo exhibition takes place in the United States, at the Rochester Art Center in Rochester (Minneapolis).
She has won several Italian and international awards, such as the first edition of Biennale della Fotografia Femminile and the John White Keep In Flight Award, and meanwhile her photographs have been exhibited at important festivals. Most importantly, she was a finalist for the W. Eugene Smith Grant 2020.
The Guardian, Vogue, Spiegel Wissen, Internazionale, L-Mag, Q Code Magazine are some of the newspapers and magazines that have featured her work. Her artistic research focuses on themes related to sexuality on one hand, and identity and self-exploration on the other, drawing from intimate and autobiographical experiences.