Ray Ciarrocchi studied painting and drawing at the Art Institute of Chicago and Washington University, in St. Louis, with Wally Barker, Fred Conway, and Stephen Pace. He earned his M.F.A. from Boston University where he studied with David Aronson and Reid Kaye.
He was represented by and had numerous solo exhibitions in New York City at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, the Fischbach Gallery, and the Rich Perlow Gallery. Other solo exhibitions in the U.S. include the Joan Whitney Payson Gallery at Westbrook College in Portland, ME and the Gotham Book Mark Gallery in NYC. While in Italy, he had four solo exhibitions sponsored by the Italian Government. In 2015, he had a solo exhibition of charcoal drawings from landscape at the University of Richmond Museums in Richmond, VA.
He was the recipient of a MacDowell residency, a Fulbright Grant (Florence, Italy); a Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant; a Gottlieb Foundation Grant; an Ingram Merrill Foundation Fellowship Award and two grants from the Pollock/Krasner Foundation.
Ciarrocchi taught painting, drawing, colour and design at Columbia University, Pratt Institute, Parsons School of Design, Brooklyn College, Baruch College, and was a visiting artist at the Maryland Institute College of Art and at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada.
He is based in New York City and for the last 20 years has been living and working part of the year in Italy.
