Artist Michael Frassinelli was born in Hartford, CT in 1964. He studied art at the University of CT, with a focus on design and sculpture, receiving his BFA in 1986. He has been a prop maker, set designer, mask-maker, free-lance artist, and ship’s carpenter, and has worked with a variety of people, from The San Francisco Ballet and Vermont’s Bread and Puppet Theatre, to a German production company and a Balinese mask-carver. Although he has worked in a variety of art mediums over the last 30 years he has spent the past 15 years developing the series “Legend of the Pianistas” inspired by sculpture made entirely out of piano parts but including satirical writing, paintings, documentary film, sound installation, large-scale structures, and performance. His earlier work has been shown previously in California and Connecticut, and his recent work in various galleries in and around the Boston area. He recently was awarded the 2019 Golden Educators Residency by the Sam & Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts. He has twice been a fellow at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT, and was an Artist-in-Residence at Appalachian State University in January of 2011, performing and creating a large-scale installation based on the “Legend of the Pianistas” series. In 2011 two figurative pieces and a large dwelling from the Pianista series were purchased by the Ripley’s Believe it Or Not Museum in Orlando, Florida. He currently teaches at the Dana Hall School in Wellesley, Massachusetts, where he is the Chair of the Visual Arts Department and Director of the Dana Art Gallery. He lives in Holliston, MA in an old farmhouse with his family