About Cordell Cordaro

Cordell Cordaro is a multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, publisher, designer, and independent creative force based in Rochester, New York. Although painting remains at the center of his practice, his work has never fit comfortably within the boundaries of a single medium. Over the course of his career, Cordaro has moved between visual art, documentary film, publishing, performance, character design, and collaborative storytelling, following ideas wherever they seem to want to go.

Across these different forms, the central impulse remains the same: to look beneath the surface of a person, an image, or a familiar story and uncover the emotional life hidden within it.

Cordaro has worked as a full-time visual artist since 2007, developing a distinctive figurative style that combines elegance, distortion, humor, melancholy, and quiet theatricality. His paintings are often populated by elongated figures, expressive faces, stylish outsiders, dreamers, dancers, lovers, literary characters, and people caught in moments of private reflection. They can feel swanky and cinematic, but also vulnerable, peculiar, and deeply human.

Rather than pursuing classical ideals of proportion or beauty, Cordaro allows the imperfections of the figure to become part of the emotional language of the work. A tilted posture, an exaggerated eye, an awkward gesture, or an uncertain expression may reveal more about a person than a traditionally polished portrait could. His subjects often appear composed on the surface while carrying something more complicated underneath: longing, defiance, loneliness, tenderness, pride, uncertainty, or the desire to belong.

Working primarily in acrylic, ink, oil pastel, and mixed media, Cordaro builds his images through layered marks, loose lines, transparent washes, scratches, and areas of deliberate imperfection. The visible movement of his hand is an important part of the finished work. Rather than hiding the process, he allows the drawing, revisions, and physical energy of the surface to remain present.

His imagery moves freely between contemporary life, memory, mythology, literature, faith, music, and imagined worlds. Some paintings feel like frames from an old film. Others resemble a fairy tale beginning to unravel, a half-remembered dream, or a scene from a story whose beginning and ending remain just outside the canvas. Even when the narrative is ambiguous, there is usually a sense that something has just happened or is about to happen.

Cordaro’s work has been collected throughout the United States and internationally, including by collectors in Canada, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Greece, and Spain. He has exhibited at art festivals, galleries, and independent events in Rochester and throughout the country, building a career through both direct relationships with collectors and a commitment to making original art accessible beyond traditional gallery systems.

That independent spirit has shaped nearly every part of his creative life.

Cordaro founded Art House Press as an online Rochester arts journal before transforming it into a nationally distributed print publication. Across five issues, the magazine brought together visual art, photography, essays, interviews, and cultural commentary, providing a platform for both emerging and established creative voices. By its third issue in 2017, Art House Press had secured national distribution through TNG and was available in more than 650 Barnes & Noble stores, along with additional retailers across the country.

The publication reflected Cordaro’s belief that artists do not have to wait for existing institutions to make room for them. They can create their own platforms, build their own audiences, and form communities around work they believe deserves to exist. As publisher and creative director, he shaped the magazine’s visual identity, editorial direction, and overall sense of discovery while preserving the individual voices of its contributors.

Cordaro later carried this interest in people, subcultures, and overlooked stories into documentary filmmaking.

In 2024, he directed and co-produced Ringside Stories: The Heart and Hustle of Pro Wrestling, a documentary centered on the lives of professional wrestlers in Rochester, New York. Rather than treating wrestling only as spectacle, the film explored the sacrifice, community, physical risk, personal identity, and emotional commitment behind the performances. It aired on WXXI and later received a Telly Award for its intimate and heartfelt portrayal of a passionate local subculture.

His ongoing documentary project, Return of the Sacred, examines the repatriation of Haudenosaunee cultural belongings, wampum, ceremonial objects, and ancestral remains from museums and institutions. Developed through interviews with Indigenous leaders, cultural workers, historians, museum professionals, and repatriation advocates, the film considers questions of ownership, responsibility, cultural survival, and what it means for something sacred to return home. The project reflects Cordaro’s growing interest in using film not only to document a subject, but to create space for difficult histories, living voices, and stories that have often been controlled or interpreted by outsiders.

Cordaro’s collaborative work has also extended into dance and performance. He has worked with Rochester City Ballet on set and costume design, video, and visual storytelling, bringing his painterly sensibility into spaces shaped by movement, music, and the human body. He is also developing a movement-based reimagining of the Last Supper for thirteen dancers, using choreography, gesture, stillness, music, and a single communal table rather than spoken dialogue. The project approaches the familiar story not as a static religious image, but as an emotionally charged gathering of distinct individuals confronting loyalty, doubt, intimacy, betrayal, fear, and love.

His creative practice also includes character design and independent toy and comic development. Through The Space Junk Club, Cordaro has created an eccentric science-fiction universe populated by characters such as Dorothy Nova, Professor B, Mecha Maximus, Barklight, Ry-Ko, and Count Zanyor. The project brings together illustration, writing, comic art, sofubi toy production, packaging, music, and world-building. Like much of Cordaro’s work, it balances nostalgia and humor with a sincere affection for outsiders, unlikely heroes, and strange communities.

Although these projects may appear different from one another, Cordaro does not see them as separate creative identities. Painting, publishing, filmmaking, performance, and character creation are different ways of approaching the same questions. Who are people beneath the roles they perform? What stories remain hidden behind familiar images? How can emotion be expressed when ordinary language feels inadequate? What happens when artists build their own worlds rather than waiting to be invited into someone else’s?

Cordaro approaches creativity as a form of investigation. He rarely begins with a fixed message or a neatly defined source of inspiration. Instead, he follows an image, a feeling, a face, a piece of music, a story, or an unresolved question until it begins to reveal its own direction. His work often becomes a way of processing ideas that cannot be fully explained in words.

Whether he is painting a solitary figure, documenting an overlooked community, designing an imaginary character, building an independent publication, or developing a performance around an ancient story, Cordaro is ultimately interested in creating work that feels alive. Work with personality, tension, imperfection, humor, mystery, and emotional weight.

His creative life is unified not by a single medium, but by a persistent desire to tell stories, challenge conventional ideas of beauty and value, and make room for the complicated humanity that exists beneath the outward pose.