Matthew Rolston
Matthew Russell Rolston is an American artist, photographer, director and creative director, known for his lighting techniques and detailed approach to art direction and design. Rolston has been identified throughout his career with the revival and modern expression of Hollywood glamour.
Rolston's career spans photography, film, creative direction, experiential design, branding, product design, fine art, publishing, and arts education.
Photography career
Born in Los Angeles, Rolston studied painting and drawing at the Chouinard Art Institute and Otis College of Art and Design, and in the Bay Area at the San Francisco Art Institute. He also studied drawing, photography, and imaging, and filmmaking at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California. ArtCenter awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2006. In 2025, ArtCenter conferred Rolston its Lifetime Achievement Award, placing him in the company of other prominent photography and fine art alumni, including the photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, fine art documentarian Lee Friedlander, and multidisciplinary artist Doug Aitken.While at ArtCenter, Rolston received an assignment from American artist Andy Warhol, for Warhol's celebrity-focused Interview magazine, which served as his "discovery". Thereafter, he began a successful career in photography. Rolston began shooting covers and editorial assignments for founding editor Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone, as well as for other publications such as Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, Vanity Fair, W and The New York Times Magazine. Rolston has completed thousands of photo shoots in his career, including over 100 covers for Rolling Stone.
Rolston's images have been exhibited at institutions and museums in solo and group shows including Queer Lens: A History of Photography, curated by Paul Martineau with work by Baron Adolf de Meyer, Richard Avedon, Peter Hujar, Andy Warhol, and others, at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2025; Beauty CULTure, co-curated by Manon Slome and Kohle Yohannan with work by Lauren Greenfield, Herb Ritts, Andres Serrano, Carrie Mae Weems, and others, at The Annenberg Space for Photography, Los Angeles, 2011; The Warhol Look: Glamour, Style, Fashion, with work by Richard Avedon, David Bailey, Robert Mapplethorpe, Steven Meisel, and others, curated by Mark Francis and Margery King, at The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1997; and Fashion and Surrealism, curated by Richard Martin with work by David Bailey, Horst P. Horst, Man Ray, Bruce Weber, and others, at FIT Gallery, New York, 1987.
A series of monographs has been published on Rolston's works, including:
- Big Pictures, A Book of Photographs, a selection of images from the artist's first decade as a photographer, with an introduction by American film director Tim Burton. It was published by Bulfinch Press, New York.
- beautyLIGHT, Pictures at a Magazine surveys more than twenty years of Rolston's editorial portraits. It features an introduction by photographic curator, writer, and editor Ingrid Sischy and was published by teNeues, Germany.
- Talking Heads: The Vent Haven Portraits, a fine art series consisting of large color portraits of ventriloquist dummies held in a rare museum collection. It was published by Pointed Leaf Press, New York.
- Hollywood Royale: Out of the School of Los Angeles, a retrospective capturing the artist's work in mid-career. The publication includes an essay by former Vogue and Vanity Fair design director and writer Charles Churchward, and was published by teNeues, Germany.
- In 2021, Laguna Art Museum published Matthew Rolston, Art People: The Pageant Portraits, an exhibition catalog.
- Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits is a fine art series portraying Christian mummies from the Capuchin Catacombs of Sicily. The monograph contains an introduction by American photographic historian and critic Philip Gefter and was published by Nazraeli Press, California.
Rolston's work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the National Portrait Gallery at The Smithsonian's Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture in Washington D.C., and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
Film career
Rolston has conceived, written, and directed numerous film projects, having overseen more than 100 music videos and 200 television commercials in his career, including collaborations with artists including Madonna, Janet Jackson, Beyoncé, and Miley Cyrus, along with numerous advertising campaigns – both print and television – for clients such as L'Oreal, Revlon, Estée Lauder, Clairol, Levi's, Pantene, Elizabeth Arden, Gap and Polo Ralph Lauren, among others.Rolston established a documentary production unit called 'R-ROLL', a play on the industry term 'B-roll' for behind-the-scenes footage. The 'R' is for Rolston. According to Rolston, "There's an overwhelming demand for filmed content, as clients expand their reach beyond traditional media."
R-ROLL has produced projects for Time, Inc., Amazon.com, ESPN, A&E/Lifetime Networks, SBE Entertainment Group and Virgin Hotels among others. Rolston said, "We're now entering an era where the 'making of' is just as important as the 'of'. And clients seem to enjoy the integration of our media services. Print, film, design, documentary, you might say we're a 'one-stop-shop'."
Rolston has appeared as a guest on television programs including Bravo's Shear Genius and Make Me a Supermodel, and the CW's America's Next Top Model.
Creative direction
Rolston diversified into creative direction and branding, developing experiential design projects across hospitality and product design.His hospitality clients include Mahmood Khimji's Highgate Holdings, Sam Nazarian's SBE Entertainment Group, Richard Branson's Virgin Hotels and Barry Sternlicht's SH Hotels & Resorts.
In 2024, Rolston creative-directed recording artist Jewel in The Portal: An Art Experience by Jewel. Rolston developed a life-size hologram for her Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art collaboration in Arkansas.
Fine art
Four fine art photography projects by Rolston became publications and exhibitions:Talking Heads: The Vent Haven Portraits consists of monumentally-scaled color portraits of a collection of ventriloquial figures from the Vent Haven Museum in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky. This was Rolston's first self-initiated photography project and debuted at Diane Rosenstein Fine Art in Los Angeles. It has since travelled to Miami and Berlin, and other cities. The exhibition traveled with Rolston's third monograph.
Hollywood Royale: Out of the School of Los Angeles – Rolston's fourth monograph and a traveling exhibition – is a retrospective of his editorial portrait work from 1977 to 1993. Los Angeles gallerist David Fahey edited the collection, which captures 1980s talent including Cyndi Lauper, George Michael, Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Prince.
Art People: The Pageant Portraits is a series of portraits of participants of "Pageant of the Masters", a tableaux vivants event presented at Laguna Beach, California's annual arts festival. The work includes large-scale color prints; one installation spans over thirty feet. Ralph Pucci International showed the series at its Los Angeles gallery in 2017, and Laguna Art Museum mounted the work in summer 2021 as Rolston's first West Coast solo institutional exhibition.
Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits is another dramatically scaled color portrait series of Christian mummies from the Capuchin Catacombs of Sicily. According to Rolston, the series is "a meditation on mortality", exploring existential themes through portrait photography.
Rolston's fine art photography has been exhibited in galleries including CAMERA WORK in Berlin, Germany; Diane Rosenstein Fine Art, Ralph Pucci International, and Fahey/Klein Gallery, all in Los Angeles.
Rolston describes his artistic aim as " questions about the things that make us most human."
Arts education and scholarships
In 1998, Rolston established the Matthew Rolston Scholarship for Film and Creative Direction at ArtCenter College of Design. Said Rolston, "the scholarship is intended to promote cross-disciplinary studies between film and other creative practices".In 2015, Rolston became an adjunct professor and curricular advisor to ArtCenter College's Undergraduate and Graduate Film Departments, and continues to lecture and mentor there in marketing and communications strategy, fashion communications, luxury branding, and public service messaging. At ArtCenter, Rolston teaches two original courses that he conceived and wrote. The first, focusing on marketing communications, is titled "The Power of Pleasure." And the second class, named Conscious Communication, centers on public interest communications. Rolston's classes are situated within ArtCenter's film program; however, they invite students from various disciplines, including advertising and creative direction, photography and imaging, fine art, and other courses of study offered at the college.
Within the structure of the classes, students create short-form films in an atmosphere resembling a professional communications agency, with Rolston acting as instructor, mentor, and creative director, and the students working as writer/director 'makers'.
An illustrated textbook of Rolston's The Power of Pleasure, based on his syllabus and lectures, is currently under development.
Recognizing Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles as another significant Southern California institution that shaped Rolston's artistic formation, he created the "Matthew Rolston Scholarship Fund for Product and Fashion Design at Otis College." This fund supports product and fashion design students, with a focus on communication and creative direction skills.
In 2024, Rolston took on the role of senior lecturer at Otis College, focusing on object design and development. He collaborated with Jonathan Fidler, Otis' assistant chair of product design, to create a course called Vessel of Dreams: The Packaging of Perfumery, which explores the potential for communications inherent in luxury fragrance packaging.