B.A. Van Sise is an author and photographic artist focused on the intersection between language and the visual image. He is the author of two monographs: the visual poetry anthology Children of Grass: A Portrait of American Poetry with Mary-Louise Parker, and Invited to Life: After the Holocaust with Neil Gaiman, Mayim Bialik, and Sabrina Orah Mark. He has previously been featured in solo exhibitions at the Center for Creative Photography, the Center for Jewish History and the Museum of Jewish Heritage, as well as in group exhibitions at the Peabody Essex Museum, the Museum of Photographic Arts, the Los Angeles Center of Photography and the Whitney Museum of American Art; a number of his portraits of American poets are in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. His short nonfiction and poetry has been featured in Poets & Writers, The North American Review, Nowhere, The Los Angeles Review, Tupelo Quarterly, The Southampton Review, Eclectica, Cutleaf, The Santa Clara Review and The Intrepid Times.
He has been a finalist for the Rattle Poetry Prize, the Travel Media Awards for feature writing, and the Meitar Award for Excellence in Photography. He is a 2022 New York State Council on the Arts Fellow in Photography, a Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation grant recipient, a Prix de la Photographie Paris award-winner, a winner of the Lascaux Prize for Nonfiction, and an Independent Book Publishers Awards gold medalist.
He holds one degree from Fordham University for Visual Arts and another for Linguistics: a polyglot, he is fluent or conversational in English, Italian, Ladino, French, German and Russian. He frequently undertakes public affairs projects for the United States Coast Guard, is an instructor for the U.S. Army Storytelling Workshop, and is a judge for the Army's Brumfield Mass Communications Competition. In addition to his photography and authorship, Van Sise is a member of the National Arts Club, the National Press Photographers' Association, the New York Press Photographers' Association, and the St. Andrew's Society of New York; he also serves on the board of directors of the Amore Opera Company, and as a grant panelist for the Queens Council for the Arts and Flushing Town Hall's Art Grants for Queens.
A member of the National Book Critics' Circle, he is a reviewer of poetry and photography titles for the New York Journal of Books.