Biography

Hannah Brancato (she/her) is an artist and educator based in Baltimore. She is co-founder of FORCE: Upsetting Rape Culture, an art and organizing collective that creates creative interventions to disrupt rape culture. Founded in 2010 by and for survivors, FORCE is nationally known for producing large-scale public art campaigns. Their work has been covered by CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, NPR, Fast Company, Washington Post, Voice of America, and Refinery29. FORCE is a recipient of the 2016 Sondheim Artscape Prize, the most prestigious arts award in the Mid-Atlantic Region.

Hannah was a 2015 OSI-Baltimore Community Fellow to launch FORCE’s Baltimore based survivor collective, Gather Together. She began to acknowledge her own experience as a survivor in 2008, while working with survivors of domestic and sexual violence at House Of Ruth Maryland. Together, they created Advocate Through Art, an awareness campaign by and for domestic violence survivors.

Brancato is currently faculty at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). She is dedicated to mobilizing visual culture uproot and resist white supremacy, structural racism and rape culture. In all of her work, she challenges viewers and participants to make connections between personal experience and social injustices and realities. Hannah received her MFA in Community Art from MICA in 2011.