SHORT
Holiday Noel Campanella is a multi-disciplinary creative from South Philadelphia. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Philadelphia Stories, ONE ART, SWWIM Every Day, San Pedro River Review, and elsewhere. Her visual art’s been exhibited at The Smithsonian Museum, sold nationally at Anthropologie, and collected in public and private collections, including Vanderbilt Libraries Special Collections. She has degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
LENGTHY + ARTIST STATEMENT
Holiday Noel Campanella is an artist and writer from South Philadelphia, where she was raised by her working-class, Catholic, Italian-American grandparents. As a chronically ill high school dropout, she spent her teenage years doing carnie gigs on the boardwalk at the Jersey Shore.
She has a dual-degree BFA from the University of Pennsylvania in creative writing, with a historic four-year certificate of painting from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. During her semester abroad at Temple University Rome, she developed a deep appreciation of long-term solo travel. Her unconventional path through education continues to inform her interest in the paradoxes of desire and identity as they relate to culture and class.
Her multidisciplinary work spans poetry comics, puppetry, zines, and other forms that combine text and image, often exploring themes of place and inheritance, the erotic and embodied, and aging, loss, and grief. She is drawn to the macabre, absurd, grotesque, and uncanny as it intersects with the natural, sentimental, and mundane. Her practice functions as a balm for her need for obsessive record keeping, providing a mechanism through which she attempts to save everything.
Her current projects include finalizing two full-length poetry manuscripts for publication: When Death Was a Woman, which follows the death of her grandfather and her marriage, and The Brides of Everything, a 115-poem series documenting her dog walks at FDR Park in the year that followed, as a meditation on devotion in spite of impermanence. While editing, she is actively writing on Nashville, the Southern Gothic, and performative or hyperreal masculinity, alongside an ongoing series on monstrous femininity and its origins, hybridity, and transformations.
Her work has been sold (Anthropologie, Ghost Gallery) and exhibited nationally (The Smithsonian Museum, The Clay Studio, The Philadelphia Sculpture Gym), published in numerous lit mags (SWWIM Every Day, San Pedro River Review, Philadelphia Stories, Gigantic Sequins), and is in public and private collections (The Free Library of Philadelphia, Vanderbilt Libraries Special Collections). Her curatorial work spans co-founding a multi-day indie publishing festival (Zine City Fest w/ Artville), which won a 2024 Best of Nashville award, and putting together solo and group shows (Coop Gallery) in her years living in Nashville, Tennessee.
Professionally, she has worked as a publishing assistant at an independent press, as a fabricator and administrator for multiple small craft businesses in jewelry and ceramics, and has designed hundreds of weddings as a floral designer and buyer. She is equally intrigued by solving the problems of fine art, craft, and design.
When she is not writing or making art, you can find her figuring out the dirtiest hiking trail where she can take her dog, Frankie, to identify new plants and splash around in a creek, or at midnight horror movie releases with her friends.
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