Chantal Calato

Chantal Calato (b. 1982) is an American artist raised in Niagara Falls, New York near the infamously toxic Love Canal. Much of her art has been rooted in personal experience and research. Niagara Falls has become her muse, with a focus on exploring its underbelly, the long covered up parts of the city.

Calato’s multi-disciplinary practice is informed by a background in photography which she studied at the University at Buffalo, and an M.F.A. in Stage Design that she received at Northwestern University. She has lived in Brazil, Chicago, and London. And now lives and works in NYC with a satellite studio in Niagara Falls. Calato has created her own mini universe working as a painter, sculptor, photographer, and installation artist. Her work has been shown in venues including Trimania, Buffalo Museum of Science, Artpark and the Grain Silos for City of Night in Buffalo. She designed massive warehouse parties and outdoor spectacles for Chicago’s Redmond Theatre in the parks on Michigan Lake and she hand-engineered and built costumes that were worn at a White House Halloween Party in D.C. “Unseen” will be her first solo museum show at the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, New York.

In 2025 Calato was awarded the Anonymous Was A Woman Environmental Arts Grant through NYFA, Generator Fund Grant through BICA and a Creative Impact Grant through A.S.I. to fund the creation of large sculptures built from discarded plastic toys. 

In 2024 she received a New Work Grant to build her sculpture “The Big Wheel” and an  Arts Programming Grant that she used to hold a series of workshops with immigrant and refugee children at the Burchfield Penney Art Center. Calato was named Artist of the Year Finalist by Arts Services Inc in 2021 for her solo show “UNSEEN” at the Burchfield Penney Art Center in 2020. She received the Global Warming Art Project grant from Ben Perrone and the ‘Environmental Maze’ project donors in 2018. Her work has been shown at the Burchfield Penney Art Center, the Castellani Art Museum, Art Park, and at The White House during President Obama’s tenure. Calato’s environmental work has been the subject of talks on NPR, in humanities festivals and was recently written about in “The Age of Loneliness”, by author Laura Maris, published by Graywolf Press in 2024. 

Calato holds an M.F.A. from Northwestern University and a B.F.A. from University at Buffalo.