About the team!
Bianca (left) and riel (right) sitting on the living room floor of one of their childhood homes.
Bianca (front) and riel (back) sitting on a black horse in the yard of one of their childhood homes. This was their 8th birthday party.
Bianca and riel are co-founders and co-directors of Begin Collective
Begin Collective was created by twin siblings riel and Bianca Sturchio in 2020-2021 out of a desire to cultivate a creative community within their intersectional identities. The collective is most notably known for their personal photography series, before the last lilac blooms (formerly called Chasing Light). After working on before the last lilac blooms for over fifteen years, riel and Bianca decided to use their experience to formally launch Begin Collective as a way to create intersectional connections and provide a platform that can help support others through group-guided photography projects.
Bianca Sturchio (she/her)
Bianca earned her MSW (2020) and BSW (2019) from the University of Southern Maine.
She is a conditionally licensed social worker working full time as a therapist at a community health clinic and per diem as a milieu social worker at a local women’s shelter.
In her spare time, you can find Bianca thrifting velvet or puff-sleeved tops, painting or creating mixed media pieces, or attending live music events.
Follow Bianca on Instagram!
riel Sturchio (they/them)
riel (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist. They use their experiences with queerness and illness to provoke, and criticize socially idealized normative fantasies of beauty, ability, and gender identity. They pair their academic background in critical queer phenomenology, bodily disorientation, and affect to explore the sculptural tactility of sound, the mediation of distance through varieties of touch and the body, and the value of intentional embodiment, ritual, and community. They are interested in how their body is forced into disorientation through disease and use this disoriented perspective as a foundation for active witnessing rituals. hey received an MFA from the University of Texas, Austin (2018), and a BFA in Photography from the Maine College of Art (2012). They are an Assistant Professor of Instruction in Photography at the University of Iowa.
Follow riel on Instagram!
Creative Fellow / project support
Kyleigh Devine
Kyleigh (she/her) is a fourth-year student majoring in English and creative writing and pursuing her BFA in photography at the University of Iowa. When she isn't taking photos along the lowa River, she's probably having a lot of feelings or writing about bugs.
This fellowship is supported by an Arts and Humanities Initiative grant through Office of the Vice President for Research at the University of Iowa.