Angela Manno is an award-winning artist based in Scotland. She is a graduate of Bard College and studied art at the San Francisco Art Institute, Parsons School of Design, and l’Ecole des Arts in Lacoste through Sarah Lawrence College, France. She trained with master iconographer Vladislav Andrejev in the ancient liturgical art of Byzantine-Russian iconography.
A three-time grant recipient from the Xerox Corporation, Manno’s art has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions including the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C, the Smithsonian Institution, the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and other museums around the world.
In 1988, Manno was commissioned by NASA to commemorate the U.S. return to space flight with the launch of Discovery, the first after the Challenger accident. She is the only female visual artist selected for this honor. Other artists to capture the novelty of space travel for the space agency include Norman Rockwell, Robert Rauschenberg, and James Wyeth. Her artwork for this assignment has toured throughout the United States and is part of the permanent NASA space art collection at the Kennedy Space Center.
Manno’s major solo exhibition, Conscious Evolution: The World At One, toured internationally and was seen by more than a quarter of a million people. With the support of private and corporate sponsors—including actor Tom Hanks, AXA Space, and Prince Sultan bin Salman bin Abdul-Aziz of Saudi Arabia—the artwork featured in the exhibition became part of the permanent fine art collection of the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum.
In May 2022, Manno was commissioned by the Vatican Dicastery on Integral Human Development to create an audio-visual program to open Laudato Si’ Week 2022, the seven-year anniversary of Pope Francis’ groundbreaking encyclical. The program, Responding to the Cry of the Earth, featured images from her series Contemporary Icons of Endangered Species and appeared on computer screens around the world as part of the global event No More Biodiversity Collapse: Rebalancing Social Systems with Nature.
