Cara Benedetto’s multimedia practice examines the creation of value and its ingrained structures. Through printmaking, writing, performance, pedagogy, and video, Benedetto embraces the poetics of contradiction through pluralism. Her work layers gendered language with content from popular media that embody ideologies of progress that prevent femme- identifying subjects from voicing their true wants. Formally trained as a printmaker, Benedetto emphasizes the hierarchy of different forms of print media and embraces the physicality of the medium as a metaphor for the fragility of our present moment. Her images and text together reveal the alienating effects of patriarchal capitalism and present complex voices that are open and multivalent. She creates interruptions as a form of resistance, finding optimism, gentle understanding, and empathic vision.

Cara Benedetto (b.1979, Wausau, WI) lives and works in Richmond, VA. She received her MFA from Columbia University in 2009. Benedetto has had solo and two-person exhibitions at Rose Easton, London; Chapter NY, New York; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Michael Jon Gallery, Detroit; Art Metropole, Toronto; and Young Art Gallery, Los Angeles; among others. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; the Hite Art Institute, Louisville; The Pit, Los Angeles; The Blueproject Foundation, Barcelona; The Jewish Museum, New York; Art in General, New York; Cooper Cole, Toronto; and the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; among others.

Benedetto is the author of two romance novels, The Coming of Age and Burning Blue, and is the editor of Contemporary Print Handbook, published with Halmos. In 2020, Benedetto published her first collection of short stories, Origin of Love and Other Tales of Degradation.