SUSANNA FIONA MURRAY  is an Italian-British visual artist working across photography, archive, installation, and staged visual narrative. Her practice explores the unstable relationship between identity, memory, ritual, and place, often through domestic objects, gestures, bodies, and inherited forms.

In After Us (2025), developed during an artistic residency at the Archaeological Section of the Oliveriani Museums in Pesaro, in collaboration with Centrale Fotografia, Murray brings contemporary absence into dialogue with Picene funerary culture and ancient burial practices. In The Dianara (2022), she reinterprets the folkloric figure of the Janara as a surviving structure through which femininity, transmission, and concealment continue to move within contemporary life.

Other projects include Mrs. Hollow Is Coming to Play and About Mary, a work developed from family archives that reflects on migration, inheritance, and the transformation of identity across generations.

Murray studied portrait and fashion photography at the International Center of Photography in New York. Her work has been shown internationally, in solo and group exhibitions, and in 2026 After Us was shortlisted for the Belfast Photo Festival.

She lives and works in Pesaro, Italy, and holds a degree in Psychology from the University of Bologna.

More of her work may be appreciated on her website and IG account.

After the First Look pairs a selection of photographs by Susanna Fiona Murray, drawn from After Us and The Dianara, with original poems by Jorge R. G. Sagastume written in response to the images. The project sits with what the first look identifies and the second look revises: presence that turns out to be older than the room, domesticity that turns out to carry ritual, inheritance that survives corrosion. It also sits with what has been made to vanish, or has vanished on its own: the Picene culture whose alphabet we can't read, the young woman from a flea-market photograph whose name no archive will recover, the feminine figures folklore renamed as witches so they could be silenced. Image and text remain separate. Each does its own work. The reader is invited to slow down enough for the second look to appear, and for the voices the first look does not hear to become audible.

Sagastume is a writer, editor, professor of literature and philosophy, a printmaker, and the editor of The Pasticheur. Literature, Art & Ideas. His work moves between poetry, storytelling, criticism, and visual dialogue, with a sustained interest in the body, the self, memory, and the ethics of looking.