How to Draw a Perfect Circle is about perfection, control, and the grip they have had on her life.
She grew up as the classic “good girl” — successful, smart, pretty, and kind — yet also a people pleaser who followed every rule, voiced no opinions, and ignored her own needs.
Checking those boxes for others came at the cost of herself and eventually led to anorexia during her teenage and college years. This series emerged from her need to examine how those patterns were formed and how they continue to shape her.
Alongside the images are diary entries and letters, written to others and to herself, that trace her struggles. The tension between text and image reflects the duality of her experience: the polished, self-deprecating façade she presented to the world and the silent turmoil beneath it.
About Catherine Panebianco
Catherine Panebianco, born in Canada, currently lives in Jamestown, New York. She is a memory excavator who uses photographs and text to explore her own life and the lives of her family members in order to come to terms with who she was, who she is, and who she wants to become. Her monograph Holding Time was published by Yoffy Press in March 2021 and is included in the collections of the George Eastman Museum and the Museum of Modern Art libraries.
She received the 2020 LensCulture Critics’ Choice Top Ten Award and the 2020 CENTER Project Launch Award, and was selected as a 2019 Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50 artist, as well as a Critical Mass finalist in 2016, 2020, 2022, and 2023. She was also a semi-finalist for the 2021 National Portrait Gallery’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. Her work has been exhibited widely in the United States and internationally, including at Cortona On The Move in Italy, the BBA Photographic Prize in Germany, and the Imago Lisboa Photo Festival in Portugal. She has been featured in numerous publications, including Oxford American, la Repubblica, The Guardian, Lenscratch, and B + W Magazine. [Official Website]
