For over nine years, Gina Grillo has committed her personal creative work to a photographic documentary project entitled, “Between Cultures: Children of Immigrants in America.”

As a photographic artist and granddaughter of Italian immigrants, The “Between Cultures” project has allowed an exploration of the struggle of immigrant children trying to secure their own cultural identity. Over this period she has set out to photograph citizenship ceremonies, cultural celebrations, as well as new immigrant families at home, trying to capture some of the visual impact of assimilation. Because of the complexity of the immigrant experience Gina Grillo has chosen to concentrate on children of immigrants, which she views as a natural starting point for the study of visual assimilation in its purest form.

A number of years ago, with the evolution of this project, Gina Grillo was given sole access by the U.S. Department of Immigration and Naturalization to photograph new immigrant arrivals entering through O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. Working in the tradition of Lewis Hine, Ms. Grillo photographed new immigrant families on their first day in the United States during the first few hours of their arrival. The impact of this experience has led to future plans to photograph new immigrant arrivals at ports of entry across the United States.

As a growing part of her visual project on immigrants, she has also focused on creating images of children of immigrants at school, working closely in the inner-city school environments of Chicago, New York, and Brooklyn. As an extension of her image making, Ms. Grillo has begun to collect artifacts of the child’s immigrant experience, i.e. essays and drawings describing their journey to America.

The “Between Cultures” project is dedicated to furthering cultural awareness and tolerance of human difference.