Charlie Grosso believes that life is a series of questions to be lived — and that the living of it shapes you. She has tested this theory extensively.

Her grandparents fled communist China, leaving everything behind. She was sent to America at eleven — alone, with a suitcase and her ABCs — by a father who wanted to free her from the lineage. A Chinese American woman with a male Italian name, she has been confounding expectations ever since.

She trained as a photographer and built a career making images for major brands — Lexus, Nike, and Comedy Central among them — work that looked like advertising and functioned as interrogation. She has been writing in parallel for just as long, essays, dispatches, and cultural criticism published in Gastronomica, Creem, Maker, Hi.Co, and more. She raced a small car from London to Ulaanbaatar alone, becoming the only woman that year to finish the Mongol Rally solo. She spent fourteen years photographing food markets across 42 countries — a project called Wok the Dog, exhibited internationally and published widely, which began as a question about food and became a question about what culture chooses to see. She co-founded Baang + Burne Contemporary, an unconventional art gallery in New York built to circumvent the artworld's gatekeeping problem — 37 exhibits, four international art fairs, an international roster of artists working in every medium. In 2016 she founded Hello Future, building education programs for adolescent refugees, because displacement had been her first education and she knew what a brutal teacher it is.

A USC graduate, fellow of Edmund Hillary, Kravis Leadership, Acumen, Boehm, and Luminary x UBS. Winner of the Prix de la Photographie Paris Public Choice Award for Documentary Photography. First business at twenty.

The question she is living now is whether AI is a rupture or a correction — whether the acceleration pushes us back toward what it actually means to be embodied, present, with each other. She is paying attention. The work is beginning.