Christy Schnabel

Born in Los Angeles, Christy Schnabel spent her childhood playing on the beaches at the foot of Santa Monica Canyon. At UCLA, she studied art, architecture, history and film, and went on to study set design in graduate school at USC. For years, she worked in the set department on various films and music videos, while, in her free time, she played guitar and wrote songs. In 1993, she met Jerry di Rienzo at the Whiskey A-Go-Go, where his band, Cell (Geffen), was playing. Soon after, they started a band of their own called Ugly Beauty and, in 1995, they signed a record deal with Atlantic Records . After releasing The Sweetness, they had a child in 2001, and soon after, they opened Hot Pie Records, a recording studio in Pasadena where Jerry began producing music, including Cass McCombs Dropping the Writ and Christy’s solo record, Duchess, released in 2005 on Adam Pfahler’s Blackball Records. After welcoming a second child in 2007, Christy picked up her first camera, a Sony A7R. Making pictures was a way to make art on her own schedule, which, as a mother of two daughters, was more manageable than being out on the road. In 2017, after years of practice, she found herself back on the beaches at the foot of Santa Monica Canyon where she spent two years sitting alongside the bike path making portraits. The resulting body of work became her first monograph, The Bike Path (ModBird Press, 2020).