Yolanda Cuomo (born June 7, 1957) is an American artist, educator, and art director known for her collaborations and intuitive design work with visual and performing artists, including Richard Avedon, the estate of Diane Arbus, Paul Simon, Laurie Anderson, Twyla Tharp, Laurie Simmons, Donna Ferrato, Larry Fink, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Sylvia Plachy, Gilles Peress, John Cohen, Paolo Pellegrin, Peter van Agtmael, Andrew Moore, and the estate of Al Taylor. Since the mid-1980s Cuomo has often collaborated on books and exhibitions with the Magnum Photos agency and Aperture.
Cuomo is the recipient of numerous awards, including the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award in 1991, 1995, and 2004, and the National Magazine Award, in 2004, from the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) for her art direction of Aperture.
Early life
Cuomo was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, and was raised in West New York, New Jersey, by John Cuomo and Rosa DeGennaro, both Italian immigrants. DeGennaro took Cuomo to Saturday morning art classes when she was in the third grade. She attended Saint Joseph of the Palisades High School. Cuomo began college at Montclair State University, where she studied fine art, before transferring to Cooper Union. At Cooper Union, Cuomo focused her fine art practice by working with the filmmaker Robert Breer and her practice in conceptual art with sculptor Hans Haacke.
Early career
After graduating from Cooper Union, Cuomo began working as an Assistant Designer at Mademoiselle magazine in 1980. Mademoiselle’s Art Director, Paula Greif, introduced Cuomo to Marvin Israel, who took an interest in the young designer. In their first work together, Israel and Cuomo designed a poster celebrating the visionary work of Alexey Brodovitch for a retrospective exhibition in Paris at the Grand Palais. Israel hired Cuomo as the Art Director of the Movies magazine where she began working with many of the photographers who would later shape her career. Through Israel, Cuomo had her first opportunities to work with Richard Avedon, Gilles Peress, Deborah Turbeville, Sylvia Plachy, Hiro, and Neil Selkirk, among others.
In 1983, while working at the Movies, Cuomo was asked by Laurie Simmons to design a book of her photographs from the series In and Around the House. In the early 1980s, Cuomo was the Associate Art Director at Vanity Fair, working closely with Alexander Liberman. At the same time, Avedon soon hired Cuomo to art-direct advertising campaigns for Christian Dior, Coco Chanel, and Calvin Klein. Later, Cuomo would collaborate with Avedon, Israel, and the dancer-choreographer Twyla Tharp, on a poster for Twyla Tharp Dance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Cuomo’s mentor, Marvin Israel, died in May 1984 while working on Richard Avedon’s exhibition of In the American West in Dallas.
In 1985 the Village Voice hired Cuomo as the Art Director for VUE (called View for the first issue), their new fashion magazine. During VUE’s short life of six issues, Cuomo hired photographers, including Nan Goldin, Larry Fink, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Gilles Peress, Richard Corman, Amy Arbus, Michael Spano, Lynn Davis, Ellen Carey, Jeremiah Dine, William Wegman, and Sylvia Plachy, to photograph fashion spreads. While on assignment for VUE, photographers were given total creative freedom. For one assignment, Nan Goldin photographed a pregnant female body builder at a Russian bath in New York City’s East Village. The image was eventually included in Goldin’s book The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. VUE’s unconventional approach to fashion content was polarizing, which earned praise but also scorn. Radio personality Howard Stern called VUE "disgusting" after seeing Goldin’s photographs. David Schneiderman, publisher and editor-in-chief of the Voice, said, "An executive from one major store, whose goods grace another model in the spread, found the ladies in lace 'shocking'... I knew the magazine would be controversial, but we've built a profitable business here in the last thirty years being controversial." In fall 1986, the Village Voice dissolved VUE.