An artist, a physician, a curator.

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 painted 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, was the last in that lineage.

In Romanian Orthodox tradition, you do not paint an icon. You write it. The word of God can be inscribed; it cannot be depicted. Fodoreanu’s practice draws on this closed folk-religious tradition and his training as a physician. Across mediums — painting, drawings, photography, sculpture, video, installation, and creative writing — the work pursues a poetry of light: receiving the light already there and shaping it back in like a poem.

His ten-foot mirror-polished stainless steel sculpture Cor Fabrica, after a muscle-figure plate from Andreas Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543), has been donated to the Hillcrest Community Foundation for permanent installation at the Pride Promenade in San Diego, California.

Solo exhibitions include writings (level of service not required, La Jolla, 2025); Liminal Forms, his MFA thesis exhibition presenting preamble and assemble (The Invisible Dog Art Center, Brooklyn, 2023); Contrapposto (the MET at UC San Diego School of Medicine, 2023); Ode to the Lake Sacalaia (Ronald H. Silverman Fine Arts Gallery, Cal State LA, 2023); water hands (2021), thou shadow (2020), street smart (2019), and dancers (2019) at Cornel/Henry Art, San Diego; lost trees (Next Door, San Diego, 2020); and SplitS (Harvard Arts First, Boston, 2011).

Fodoreanu studied with Duane Michals during his MFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

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, Diversions LA, The San Diego Union-Tribune, and elsewhere. Among the writers on the work are recipients of the Rabkin Prize for Art Criticism (Seph Rodney, PhD, 2020; Shana Nys Dambrot, 2022) and the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant (Andrew Berardini and Seph Rodney, PhD).

In 2024, Fodoreanu co-founded level of service not required (LOS/NR) in La Jolla, California, 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 Museum of American Art, 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. His own 2025 solo at LOS/NR, writings, was the subject of essays by Andrew Berardini, Shana Nys Dambrot, and Seth Combs.

Fodoreanu holds a Doctor of Medicine from Harvard, an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, and a BA in philosophy from the University of California, San Diego. He is a practicing pediatrician and lives between San Diego and New York. He is the author of three books of Romanian poetry and the photographic monograph Ode to the Lake Sacalaia (Cornel/Henry Art, 2022).