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The Hartman Profile is an ongoing series that features CALA faculty, staff, and students—all through the lens of award-winning Adjunct Associate Professor and writer Susan Hartman.

The Hartman Profile: Letizia Mariotti

Six years ago, Leti Mariotti—a young Frenchwoman—walked into my classroom. She looked shell-shocked.

Leti had just arrived from Berlin, where she’d been living, and working as an editor. “Berlin’s tough,” said Leti, 34, who was born in Paris. “The weather is cold and dark. I was looking for a break.” She had sublet an apartment for three months on the Upper West Side, and was planning to return to Berlin. But she also wondered if she might find a niche here and stay.

She had signed up for my Art of the Photo Essay class not long after she’d arrived. “I wanted to feel more comfortable in English,” she said. Already an accomplished photographer, she liked the idea of telling a story in photographs and words.

I was taken aback by the beauty of Leti’s first photo, which she shot for our class: a Renoir-like little girl on a gritty playground. And I was amazed by her later photos of a local character, the Pigeon Man of Washington Square Park, sitting enveloped by hundreds of birds.

But she struggled to write in English. “You have shorter sentences,” she said. “It’s more to the point than French.” And she felt self-conscious speaking in class. “I mumble in English,” she said. “My friend told me, ‘You seem so much more clever in French!’”

But our class was welcoming, and Leti started to relax. She worked hard on her text for the Pigeon Man photos, sitting with me after class, and working with me through email. By the end of the five week course, “I felt more confident, and more at ease,” she said.

She started to see herself as a photographer: “It became 100% of my time,” she said. She began doing freelance work for Philadelphia Weekly, and shooting stills on TV and independent film sets. She moved to the Lower East Side–and fell in love with her new neighborhood’s narrow, dense streets.

We’d sometimes meet for coffee—and Leti began showing me a personal project: She was documenting Judith Malina, 87, the artistic director and co-founder of The Living Theatre, who was being evicted from her longtime residence and theater on the Lower East Side, and moving into the Lillian Booth Actors Home, a nursing home facility in New Jersey.

I loved Leti’s black and white photos of the fragile looking Ms. Malina. I wanted to meet her—and to write a story to go along with Leti’s images.

I contacted my editor at The New York Times. And Leti and I—no longer student and teacher—began working together on an assignment.

Read the finished piece here: The New York Times: Founder of Avant-Garde Theater Tackles a New Scene

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Take one of Susan’s courses this Spring!

The Art of the Photo Essay

Interviews and Profiles