Download Clare Ultimo CV here
Email Clare
Briefer Bio

Clare Ultimo: Not-So-Brief Bio:
Clare Ultimo has always been passionate about exploring the boundaries between verbal and visual communication. As a serious student of metaphysics and cross-cultural spiritual thinking since the age of 14, she has also been an amateur researcher and advocate for "all things alternative" for the past 30 years.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, of Neapolitan descent, Ultimo is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, writer and educator. She began an award-winning design studio in 1987 in the back of a typesetter's office on 34th street, right near Macy's. See L&B under Esteemed Friends on our Link Page. At that time, she had a BA in English from Hunter College, and had done six years of hard labor in all kinds of art departments around New York City.

As the studio developed, it attracted an amazing group of young designers, artists, writers, and media types (still in contact with each other over 20 years!) Ultimo Inc. has been awarded NY Art Directors Club, AIGA, and PROMAX awards and has twice been nominated for the Chrysler Innovation in Design Award by Milton Glaser. Clare presented her ideas about Guerrilla Marketing for the first time in 1994 at a Co-Op America conference in Washington DC. Ultimo has quietly been on the forefront with corporate clients as an advocate of socially and ecologically responsible design since 1991, long before it entered the mainstream.

In 2000, she invented "Poetry Dog Tags" and "Friendship Tags", (poetry you can wear!) published by Chronicle Books, under the influence of her "other" life – as a poet. In 1993, she came to the Nuyorican Poets Cafe to read poetry, but eventually did much more than that. In almost 20 years there behind the scenes, she created the Nuyorican and Nuyorican Poetry Slam visual identities, as well as the first Slam archive. Verbs on Asphalt: The History of Nuyorican Poetry Slam (www.verbsonasphalt.com), is the first and only document that tells the story of the birth of this wild new art form in New York City.

Clare has read her poetry at The Kitchen, Bowery Poetry Club, St. Marks-in-the-Bowery, Bluestockings, The American Museum of Natural History, Cornelia Street Cafe, Carpo's Cafe, The West End Bar and The Bottom Line. At the suggestion of Diane Di Prima, her poetry has been published in "The Paterson Literary Review". Her chapbook "Fear of Bensonhurst" is in process.

Ultimo has recently received an MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College and has taught Communication Design at Parsons, Pratt and Hunter. She has shown her visual work at the Ward Nasse Gallery and the Judson Memorial Church in NYC as well as the Eyedrum Gallery in Atlanta. Her experimental video work "Inner Dialogue" is in the permanent collection of the Casoria Museum of Contemporary Art in Naples, Italy.