Bella Savignano’s love of underground art began as a personal hobby before evolving into the driving force behind her academic and curatorial career. Her BFA Design History and Practice senior thesis, FLASH BANG—an exhibition, lecture, and hand-bound book developed through an independent study—expanded her personal archive of 1960s and 1970s subculture. Through these works Savignano reimagined glam rock, the music press, and youth culture from a queer, community-centered perspective, using archival materials and her own collection of underground ephemera to tell a rich, inclusive story of the era. It was the kind of interdisciplinary boundary-breaking project, she says, that could happen only at Parsons, under the guidance of faculty who encouraged her to take creative risks and turn her passion into practice.
“The way historical narratives are presented is just as important as the history itself,” Savignano explains. “Combining something structured and formal, approachable and experimental, and tangible allowed me to make the work more accessible. A people’s history should be accessible to the people.
Today she continues to combine research, storytelling, and presentation strategies as administrator for the Fine Art department at Swann Auction Galleries, where she manages client intake, cataloging, and logistics for sales of Illustration, American Art, and 19th- and 20th-Century Art. She also coordinates Swann’s annual Subculture Sale, a fitting continuation of her Parsons research on underground movements. She also writes for the gallery’s specialist blog on topics such as the importance of fashion illustration and the evolution of subcultures ranging from punks and goths to beatniks and club kids. Savignano was even featured in Swann’s What’s in My Auction? video series in April 2025. In the series, she shares one of her favorite discoveries: a 1960s game titled LSD: Ludicrous Systems Development—A Psychedelic Happening Construction Kit, alongside other subcultural ephemera from the period.
Savignano’s creative entrepreneurial spirit predates her time at Parsons. As a high school student in Atlanta, she launched Electric Stardust, an online vintage clothing store run out of a spare bedroom and later a rented warehouse. Drawn to the intersection of culture and commerce, she initially enrolled in Parsons’ BBA Strategic Design and Management program before realizing that her true passion lay in the stories behind objects rather than business logistics. “I realized my favorite part of running a business was talking to people and being the steward of objects,” she says. “I wanted to work directly with items.”
“I brought to Parsons an interest in material culture from owning a vintage store,” Savignano adds. “Professors like Elizabeth Morano and Mev Luna helped me see myself not just as a historian but as an artist—someone who could create from research rather than simply present facts. That was incredibly valuable.”
Savignano credits Margot Bouman, the program director and an associate professor of visual culture, as a key mentor who shaped her thinking about visual studies and interdisciplinary research. “Every time I plan to make a big life change, I consult Margot about it,” she says. “She has such a clear vision for the BFA program and gets genuinely excited about the different directions her students take after graduating. Before Parsons, I didn’t know what the field of visual studies was. Through Margot’s classes, I came to appreciate a range of analytical methodologies and see that research doesn’t have to fit neatly into a single discipline. She helped me translate my interests into something visual, analytical, and creative all at once.”
Courses like Visual Archives, taught by Pascal Glissmann, also proved transformative for Savignano. “Recently I actually told all of the students in Margot’s class to take it,” she says, reflecting on a visit she made to a BFA DHP program course (Making + Meaning: Proseminar) in which shared her current research and career path. “It completely changed the way I think about how we collect, organize, and interpret visual material.”
Savignano is fascinated by the ways personal and collective histories intersect through objects—a passion shaped by her Parsons education. “A lot of the items I work with now are incredibly interesting, even if they aren’t always monetarily valuable,” she says. “When consigning pieces, I often talk to the original owners, and they start recalling specific memories—waxing poetic about a moment in their life simply by seeing and handling an object. In the Subculture Sale, we sold a set of invitations for events at the golden-era NYC nightlife venue Danceteria, and the original owner was thrilled that we were giving them a new life.”
These experiences, she explains, reveal the way personal and collective histories intertwine through objects. “These niche items can hold different meanings for different people,” she explains. “I’m planning to go to grad school to study what drives people to collect and hold on to their items, especially within subcultural contexts. For a long time, these archives were privately held collections made out of love. Now, the market for them is growing—we’re seeing that at Swann, and institutions like the Brooklyn Museum are beginning to acquire zines, manifestos, and other subcultural materials.”
Savignano sees this shift as essential to expanding the historical record. “For so long, archives were focused on the ‘important people,’ not everyday citizens,” she says. “But when you overlook those everyday objects, you lose so much of history.” Her volunteer work with a group of women building an archive of punk ephemera reflects that belief. “One of them recently showed me a menu from the 1970s venue Max’s Kansas City in Union Square, onto which she’d scribbled notes about what was happening in the music scene at the time. Those notes aren’t less important than Andy Warhol’s—they might even say more about the culture of that moment. These women were documenting what was actually going on.”
The same mindset informs Savignano’s own creative process. “As a person with many passions who gets bored easily, I’ve tried a number of careers and methodologies to approach my work,” she says. “My BFA pathway allowed me to experiment with a range of media, from hand-knitting to woodcut printmaking. That freedom to experiment made me realize that my artistic practice could coexist with my research as a historian and that developing my art and design thinking would directly strengthen my work as a historian.”
Savignano’s commitment to amplifying underrepresented voices and spotlighting overlooked art also shaped her time on campus. She co-founded and served as co-president of WNSM, The New School’s now-defunct student-run radio station, and led its sister digital music publication, The Lamb, as editor in chief. Her passion for music and subcultures began long before college, but it found a new focus at Parsons.
“When I was younger, my dad always had classic rock and vinyl stations playing, so I learned a lot about music from him,” she recalls. “In high school in Atlanta, I got involved in the local scene because I was drawn to countercultural spaces, even though I wasn’t particularly rebellious. I spent several nights a week at DIY venues. My parents were fine with it as long as I kept my grades up.”
Her curiosity quickly became a creative outlet. “I started writing for a music magazine just to get press passes,” she says with a laugh. “I was interviewing artists and covering shows, and none of them knew I was only 16.”
When she moved to New York to attend Parsons, live venues were shuttered by the COVID-19 lockdowns, but her drive to document music culture didn’t fade. “Once things reopened, I went to The Strokes’ first post-lockdown benefit concert and landed an internship that sent me to multiple shows a week to interview artists,” she says.
“That’s when I realized The New School didn’t have anything like this—a student-run space for music journalism or broadcasting.”
After a campus station declined to expand into live programming, Savignano and a friend decided to start their own. “We thought, ‘If no one’s going to do it, we’ll build it ourselves,’” she says. The result was WNSM, a fully remote digital radio broadcast streamed from their apartments, the university courtyard, and shared communal spaces. “I hosted a show every semester we were in operation,” she says. “Through The Lamb, our digital publication, we sent New School students to concerts and gave them real journalistic opportunities to interview artists and cover shows. Our station was even mentioned in the New York Times as a writer’s favorite college radio station, and we put on a sold-out show with three local bands. We even designed and screen-printed our own merch.”
Beyond campus, Savignano immersed herself in the city’s creative industries. “I interned at Morrison Hotel Gallery, which was definitely relevant to my degree and put me in the space to further my historical knowledge,” she says. “A lot of clients would come in and tell stories about the musicians who were photographed, which lent itself to my interest in public history and the experiences of regular people. I also helped curate a few shows while I was there, which was really the first time I thought about exhibition design.”
Savignano also worked as a personal assistant to the renowned photographer Kate Simon, assisted at the Brooklyn-based creative agency Grand Crew, and contributed to several film and photo campaigns, including Chasing Light, an award-winning 2023 documentary about the changing landscape of Manhattan’s Chinatown, which was produced for NOWNESS, a global cultural content platform. “There were only four of us at the agency,” she recalls. “I worked alongside the creative director on production and creative ideation for advertising projects. For Chasing Light, I wrote interview questions for business owners and residents, conducted archival research, sourced imagery, and even helped shape the shot list.” Her production work also extended to Spotify’s RADAR series. Savignano was thrilled to see her shot lists used in official campaigns for the series.
After graduating in 2024, Savignano landed her current position at Swann Auction Galleries. “I found Swann because I went to an open exhibition and lecture about new directions in poster collecting and met the director and owner,” she explains. “I already had a job I really liked at a production company, but when our budget was cut and I was laid off, I saw an opening at Swann. I mentioned I’d attended the event and they remembered me. I was one of the only young people there, so I stuck out.”
As for what’s next, Savignano plans to pursue graduate studies in sociocultural anthropology or visual studies, followed by a master’s in library and information science. She describes the future beyond graduate study as exciting, if “a little nebulous.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever be someone who stays in one place,” she admits. “My dream career involves community and public history, actually talking with the residents and participants of the scenes I research. As much as I love archival work, I don’t want to spend my life in a windowless library. I love working with people.”
Savignano hopes to continue making history accessible and alive for broader audiences. “I hated history in high school because it felt so dry,” she says. “Working through artistic media like books and films can bring these stories to new audiences and offer perspectives that aren’t sterile or overly academic.”
It’s a perspective shaped by her time at Parsons, where she learned to approach design history as both scholarship and storytelling. Her Parsons education, she says, gave her “the confidence to make history feel human.”