Chris Diani

2023 Senior Exhibition Artists

Chris Diani

Art + Design: Photography | Art History Minor

About Chris Diani

Chris Diani is a filmmaker and photographer based in Providence, Rhode Island.  A graduate of Seattle Film Institute’s total immersion program, he received an Associate of Fine Arts degree from the Community College of Rhode Island in 2021 and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography with a minor in Art History from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth in 2023. 

Chris's photographs have been published in the Boston Globe, the Art in America Guide, and Options Magazine and are held in the archive of the Holt/Smithson Foundation. Colors of Pride, his solo exhibition of portraits of members of the LGBTQIA+ community, was shown at UMass Dartmouth's Gallery 244 in 2022. His first feature film, the award-winning gay zombie comedy Creatures from the Pink Lagoon, screened in over 30 cities worldwide and was released on DVD in 2007.

Statement

A multi-generational family laughing at a homophobic joke told at a holiday meal. An epithet uttered by a parent when he thinks his child is asleep. A bigoted high school principal downplaying a brutal hate crime. A pep talk that unwittingly urges a victim to spend more time with his bullies.

For a gay American boy growing up in the 1980s, these incidents – and countless others – created a hostile environment, in which my personal, social, and sexual development were negatively affected by societal homophobia and the necessity of the closet.

My Silence Did Not Protect Me is a series of autobiographical narrative photos exploring those consequential moments where indifference, hostility, or outright violence changed the course of my life.

The idea for the series was sparked by a quote from painter Louis Fratino, who described his show Come Softly to Me as “a narratively structured exhibition in which I tell myself my own story.” It also draws inspiration from the gay coming-of-age novels of writer Edmund White (particularly A Boy’s Own Story), the narrative photography of David Hilliard and Gregory Crewdson, and multidisciplinary artist Jack Pierson’s Self Portrait project. It is, at its heart, a remonstration of the closet and its toxic effects. The title of the series is a paraphrase of a quote from the late lesbian poet Audre Lorde: “My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.”