Vince Briffa is a multimedia artist, curator and researcher. His cross-disciplinary and trans-mediatic work consists of gallery and site-specific artwork, sculptural objects, video and installations. Having studied drawing and painting as well as media art, his concepts draw from contemporary artistic and aesthetic fields, integrating approaches and concerns from the areas of fine art, sociology, advertising, film studies, literature and philosophy. 

He is also a curator of contemporary art exhibitions, has written articles for various local and international art publications and regularly organises exhibitions, symposia and related events locally and internationally. Briffa is a tenured Professor of Art at the University of Malta. He was awarded a PhD by the University of Central Lancashire in the UK in 2009 and an MA in Fine Arts with distinction from the University of Leeds in 2000. He has been the recipient of a number of art residencies, including the sculpture studios at the Edinburgh College of Art, Scotland in 1996, the Leeuwarden Capital of Culture in 2018 and the Ranieri Castle in Umbria in 2018 amongst others. Commissioned projects include exhibitions and installations for the Cork 2005, Pafos 2017 and the Valletta 2018, European Capitals of Culture. 

He is a Fellow of Civitella Ranieri Foundation, New York; an International Associate, CUT Contemporary Fine Arts Lab, Cyprus University of Technology, Cyprus; and the Scuola di Cinema, Accademia di Belle Arti, Catania, Sicily. 

Over the past forty years, Briffa’s work has been exhibited in some of the world’s most prestigious museums and galleries including the Malta Pavilion, Venice Art Biennale, in 1999 and 2019; the Pierides Museum, Cyprus; the Palais des Nations, Switzerland; the Museum of Modern Art, Liechtenstein; the Casoria Museum, Naples; Villa Manin Contemporary Art, Italy; MAC, Argentina; Palais Liechtenstein, Austria; The Museum of Fine Arts, Romania and the Museum of Modern Art, Israel. He was also commissioned to design and produce the monument to commemorate the Valletta Summit on Migration for Castille Square in Valletta in 2015. His work forms part of many local and international private and public collections. 

He was awarded the prize ‘Omaggio all’Arte ed all’Innovazione a Venezia 2019’ by The the Union of Honorary Consuls of Italy (UCOI) and the National Association of Young Innovators (ANGI) at the 2019 Venice Art Biennale, and has curated exhibitions in Malta and abroad including the NRW-Forum, Düsseldorf; the Münchner Künstlerhaus, Munich; Les Rencontres Arles; De Harmonie, Leeuwarden; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Valletta amongst many others. 

As an academic, he is active in practice-based art and design research. Briffa has also been involved in the creative industries for a long number of years and was instrumental in launching computer graphics for television broadcast in Malta in the late 1980s

Photo Credit: Joe P. Smith.