ABOUT JUSTIN T. RUSSO:

Justin T. Russo is a New York–based illustrator, curator, writer, and Intimacy Archivist whose work examines memory, desire, queer Italian-American life, masculinity, grief, inheritance, and the ethics of human connection.

Russo began working professionally as an artist at fifteen. After studying Studio Art and Cinema Studies at New York University, he worked in Takashi Murakami’s studio before moving into curatorial and collections management. For approximately a decade, he helped steward more than 6,000 works for private and corporate art collections, coordinating exhibitions, conservation, acquisitions, installations, and the preservation of objects across an international collection.

Throughout that career, Russo maintained an independent visual practice rooted in drawing, particularly pencil and ink. His work is characterized by line, negative space, restraint, cinematic composition, and an enduring fascination with the emotional lives carried by images and objects. Classic Hollywood, queer history, family archives, postwar America, sexuality, and cultural memory recur throughout his work.

His illustration and public-art projects have been featured by The New York Times, and in 2019 he was selected as one of 50 artists to create a mural for WorldPride in New York. His work has been commissioned by or entered the collections of figures including Lauren Bacall, Billy Joel, Parker Posey, Kelly Ripa, and Raúl Esparza. Bacall kept Russo’s portrait of her in her home, while Russo created original artwork for Billy Joel’s Last Play at Shea playbill.

Russo’s practice has also extended into television and cultural media. He appeared as a cast member on Logo’s Fire Island and later hosted Check Your Luggage, an LGBTQ+ travel series.

After nearly two decades participating in New York nightlife and queer social culture, Russo began turning the same archival attention he had brought to art and cultural objects toward lived intimacy itself. As NYCMeatball, he developed an erotic documentary and visual archive in which sex, relationships, drawings, photographs, correspondence, and memory function as lived evidence rather than disposable content.

That work developed into Justin T. Russo: Studies in Intimacy, an ongoing interdisciplinary project bringing together illustration, memoir, oral history, family archive, sexuality, cultural criticism, and relational ethics.

His first book, The Gentleman’s Guide to Slutty Sex: Studies in Intimacy, extends that practice into literary nonfiction through sixty-five studies examining desire, conduct, intimacy, inheritance, recovery, and what human beings owe one another.

Across media, Russo’s work remains concerned with the same fundamental act: preserving the complexity of human experience before it disappears.

All works are available for sale and limited-edition prints made upon request.

For pricing or commissions please get in touch