A pediatrician making icons of the body.

C Fodoreanu was born in Romania, along the road to the Nicula Monastery in Transylvania, where pilgrims walk each summer to pray before the wonder-working Madonna of Nicula — a glass icon written by Luca of Iclod in 1681 that, according to Austrian military records, wept for twenty-six days in February and March of 1699. The peasants of Nicula “wrote” icons on glass for those pilgrims for centuries. Fodoreanu’s great-grandfather, Gheorghe Feur — Clopotarul (the Bellringer) — was the last in that lineage, working in the village in 1972.

His practice draws on that inheritance and another — the medical archive from Galen through Andreas Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543) to the present-day textbook. Working across painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, video, installation, and writing, he sets the two in conversation around the body, care, and queerness.

His ten-foot mirror-polished stainless steel sculpture Cor Fabrica, after Vesalius, has been donated to the Hillcrest Community Foundation for permanent installation at the Pride Promenade in San Diego.

Work is held in the collections of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (Paris), the De Pietri Artphilein Foundation (Switzerland), the Museum of Photographic Arts (San Diego), Harvey Milk Photo Center (San Francisco), Printed Matter (New York), the SVA Library, the Decker Library at MICA, UC San Diego, and Western University in Ontario.

Solo exhibitions include writings at level of service not required, La Jolla (2025); Liminal Forms, MFA thesis exhibition, The Invisible Dog Art Center, Brooklyn (2023); Contrapposto at the MET, UC San Diego School of Medicine (2023); Ode to the Lake Sacalaia at the Ronald H. Silverman Fine Arts Gallery, Cal State LA (2023); and SplitS at Harvard Arts First, Boston (2011).

His work has been the subject of essays and reviews by Andrew Berardini, Vittoria Benzine, Genie Davis, Shana Nys Dambrot, Justin Duyao, Seth Combs, Peter Frank, Rachel Harris-Huffman, Seph Rodney, PhD, Wayne Swanson, and Andrew Woolbright, in Hyperallergic, Whitehot Magazine, HereIn Journal, Photobook Journal, The Village Voice, Diversions LA, and The San Diego Union-Tribune. Writers on the work include recipients of the Rabkin Prize for Art Criticism and the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

In 2024 he co-founded level of service not required (LOS/NR) in La Jolla, where he serves as Art Director. The program has presented sixteen exhibitions in less than two years, including a solo presentation of video art pioneer Frank Gillette — whose work is held by the Whitney, MoMA, and the Centre Pompidou — the inaugural Self Portrait — Physician Invitational with the Kaiser Permanente Physician Wellness Committee, and an annual youth Enviro-Art program in collaboration with the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Fodoreanu holds an MD from Harvard, an MFA from the School of Visual Arts (where he studied with Duane Michals), and a BA in philosophy from the University of California, San Diego. Between 1994 and 2002 he published three books of Romanian poetry under the name CÎNDE, written in his own dialect — assembled from gathered village speech, anonymous folk verse, surviving oral material, and standard Romanian words actively modified to fit the poems’ sonic mold — alongside the icon-writing practice at Nicula. The photographic monograph Ode to the Lake Sacalaia (Cornel/Henry Art, 2022) collects later work. He is a practicing pediatrician and lives between San Diego and New York.