Biography
Robert Pierosh is a writer and multidisciplinary artist working across screenwriting, photography, moving image, and installation. His work explores themes of identity, memory, masculinity, aging, and visibility. His writing often finds dark humor in uncomfortable situations and emotional truth in the complicated ways people make sense of themselves and one another.
His short screenplay The Ashtray, a queer dramedy about friendship and getting unstuck, won First Place in Shorts at the 2026 Slamdance Screenplay Competition. It was also named a Second Rounder at the 2026 Austin Film Festival Script Competition. His short screenplay Lost and Found received Quarterfinalist recognition at the 2026 Vail Film Festival Screenplay Competition.
Robert also writes stage plays, feature screenplays, short fiction, and personal essays. His micro-memoir, A Thief for Grandma, appeared in The New York Times Modern Love column’s Tiny Love Stories series.
His visual art practice spans photography, moving image, sound, objects, and constructed environments. Early in his career, Robert used himself as a subject in layered, manually manipulated darkroom prints that fragmented and reassembled narrative, identity, and self-perception. His recent projects explore visibility, documentation, memory, and institutional systems through multimedia and installation work.
His ongoing project Permanent Record examines systems of visibility, documentation, and control through photography, moving image, portraiture, sound, and archival material. The work considers how people become fixed within institutional systems and how records and images can outlive context, correction, and lived experience.
Education
Robert earned his BFA in Fine Arts from the University of Delaware with a concentration in photography. He later completed two artist residencies at the School of Visual Arts in New York City: one through the Photography and Video department and another through the MFA Social Documentary Film program.
Exhibitions, Photography + Recognition
His work has been exhibited internationally in museums, galleries, and juried exhibitions including the Arlington Museum of Art, FSU Museum of Fine Arts, Los Angeles Center for Photography, and the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art in Korea, where his video work Memory (re)Assembly: Shellshocked was exhibited.
His photography received an Award of Excellence in the 2025 Communication Arts Photography Annual.
→ View selected exhibitions, publications + recognition
Creative Director
Before focusing on his writing and art practice, Robert spent many years as a creative director in the New York advertising industry, leading creative and user experience work for international brands across technology, travel, automotive, luxury, and consumer industries.