Mark Heitner is an American painter and photographer currently enrolled as an MA Painting candidate at the Royal College of Art, London. His visual practice spans six decades, beginning with black-and-white photography and arriving, after three careers, at painting.
His earliest encounters with art were at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where European paintings made a lasting impression. His photographic eye was shaped by a formative encounter with a street exhibition of Henri Cartier-Bresson's work, followed by sustained engagement with the collections at MoMA. He subsequently shot portrait and documentary work in medium-format film, exhibiting in international competitions before his practice was set aside by the demands of medicine and family.
Before returning to visual art, Heitner held faculty appointments at Cornell University Medical College and Fudan University Medical School. He contributed to the COVID-19 treatment framework published in JAMA (Wang et al., 2020), a protocol later adopted across more than 180 countries. He also built and led cross-disciplinary technology teams across the United States, China, and Southeast Asia.
His photographic practice resumed at the San Francisco Botanical Gardens and has been shaped by sustained attention to the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, Vivian Maier, and Gary Winogrand. His paintings -- made in acrylic on canvas, board, paper and unstretched wall-mounted canvas -- reflect the same preoccupations: loss, witness, the irreducible particularity of individual experience.
At the RCA, he is the oldest and least experienced painter in his cohort, a fact he regards as instructive. His current work includes an eleven-part oil installation for the RCA Degree Show and ongoing experiments with aluminum substrates. He is developing a major group exhibition on collective pandemic loss, supported by Arts Council England, “This Happened to You too, Remember”?
