Born in New York in 1947, after studying photojournalism and television at Boston University’s School of Public Communications, Edward Rozzo received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in contemporary photography at the Rhode Island School of Design under Harry Callahan in 1970. He moved to Italy in the early 70s where he established himself for over 30 years photographing people, places and processes for company profiles throughout North America and Europe.
Over the last twenty-five years Rozzo has combined his professional career with an intense educational involvement, conducting workshops and seminars both in Italy as well as in Europe. From 1982 till 1984 he was called upon by the director of the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan to create and implement the ambitious program Brera Fotografia. For four years he held the chair for Photographic Studies at the Accademia di Belle Arti of Bergamo, for nine years he was director of the largest university level course for photographic studies in Italy at the Istituto Europeo di Design in Milan and for two years conducted managerial seminars at the Arthur Watson IBM Centre for management in Bruxelles. For the past eight years he has been visiting professor at the Ecole Superieur d’Arts Applique’ in Vevey, Switzerland where he teaches Retail Semiotics and Visual Merchandising and since 2004 has been Teaching Associate of Visual Culture at Universita Bocconi in Milan.
In recent years he has dedicated more energy to his own personal projects, exhibiting at the Biennial International Photographic Exhibit in Turin, at the Fondazione Corrente in Milan and at the Museum of Photography Alinari in Florence. In 1998 his work Urgent stories was included in the exhibit Un Nouveau Paysage Humain at the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles, France. From 1999 to 2000 his personal exhibit, Pensieri Urbani, was exhibited at the Castello Sforzesco in Milan, and in the same year he was choosen to work on the project Osservatorio sul contemporaneo, a visual study of contemporary life styles coordinated by the Accademia di Belle Arti of Bergamo. His contribution became the series Province Mentali. In 2005 he had a personal exhibit La Lacuna del Presente (The Void of the Present) at the Heart Gallery in Verona, Italy and in 2009 was chosen by the group Alinari/24 Ore as a significant Italian artist to be included in the exhibit From the Photography of Art to the Art of Photography curated by Fabio Castelli at the Scavi Saligeri in Verona, Italy.
In 2002 his multimedia project Il Valore delle Persone created for the Banca Popolare di Verona won an EMMA Award for excellence as the best international multimedia project of the year in the category of Internal Communications.
In February of 2008, his book, Art & Ego, written with Marcus Reichert, was published in London by Ziggurat Books which followed with the publication of his essay in Art & Death edited by Marcus Reichert the following year. In June 2008 he co-chaired the international conference Communicating the Museum in Venice, Italy and in October 2009 was Guest Speaker at the Conference of National Museums in Middelberg, The Netherlands. In 2010 he was speaker at the symposium on merchandising organized by the Swiss Association of Merchandising with Kim Mitchell, Chief Communications Officer of the Museum of Modern Art of New York.
2010 saw his video productions in full swing with the distribution of his operatic video clip Segreto with soprano Sabina Macculi and pianist Maurizio Carnelli. His Corporate work continued with the COGESER Group, an energy distribution company north of Milan and his first short will be financed by the Friuli-Venezia-Giulia Region in Northern Italy in the Spring of 2010.