About
This website is designed to rent cleared art digitally for film and T.V., real-estate staging, theater, and the like. Decorators work seamlessly with their graphics department to make the process of getting a piece of art of a certain subject, style, color, or size, simply and quickly to set. All of the work on this Website is cleared by the artists and ready to download in a file size which enables the client to go up and down in size as they choose! The mission of this website is to promote, showcase, and compensate the working artists of New York City. At the same time, it provides a better quality product for the decorator to choose from! If you’re an artist interested in sharing your work with a broader audience please email info@starvingartistnyc.com.
Founder, Heidi Day Wenzel
Born in Phoenix, Arizona, Heidi Day Wenzel was raised between Arizona and South Dakota. She moved to New York City when she was 18 and attended the Fashion Institute of Technology, receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture (2009). She’s spent the last 16 years living and working in Manhattan.
Heidi has always expressed herself creatively, which was cultivated at a very young age. Her experience over the past decade includes assisting artists, designing theater sets, installing large scale installations, making puppets and scenic work for theater, creating props for television and movie productions, and set dressing as a union member in Local 52.
Heidi was always drawn to the city because of the energy and has resonated deeply with the grit and tenacity of making a living as an artist. For the last five years Heidi noticed that much of the art selected for the T.V. and movie sets was frequently used cleared art from local prop houses, and not the quality and variety that she was used to seeing in her artist community. Her mission with this project is to promote, showcase, and compensate the unestablished and undiscovered artists of New York.
Artists
Cristina Razzano
Cristina Razzano was born and raised on the south shore of Long Island, NY. She received her BFA in Fine Arts and Textile Design from the Fashion Institute of Technology. Her background of Fine Arts informed her design career in the areas of interiors, textile design work, and fashion design. Today she runs a Surf Boutique in Sayulita, Mexico that specializes in high end surf rentals and offers art, block printed t-shirts, ceramics and more. She enjoys teaching at the Fashion Institute of Technology as a pre-college professor. Her art has focused throughout the years on the use of found objects and mixed media to create sculptures and wall hangings. Her most recent work ranges from printmaking loaded with patterns to sculptural mixed media work made in response to the declining health of the Earth.
Leah Cimmelli-Orfini
Leah Cimmelli-Orfini was born and raised in New York. Her love of photography was instilled at a young age, as her grandfather was a portraiture photographer in Manhattan. In 2004, Leah joined IATSE Local 52. Over the past 17 years, she has worked professionally in film and television production, but her passion has always been photography. In a statement from the artist, “I have always been in love with the human experience. Ironically, the fast pace of today’s world is the very thing that draws me to photography. When you take a photo you are forced to pause and reflect on a single, solitary moment. To really look, and see, what’s going on in the world around you at that very instant. In that moment behind the lens, I feel I can find my breath. By capturing a few of those moments and sharing a little bit of life’s beauty with you, I feel I am doing what is meant of a photographer.”