Justin Aversano (American, b. 1992) is a photographer and digital artist whose practice bridges analog photography with blockchain and AI technologies. He is known for Twin Flames, a photographic series of twins, and for Moments of the Unknown, a year-long project of daily ten-second film portraits.,He earned a BFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2014.
In 2015 he co-founded SaveArtSpace with Travis Rix, a non-profit that installs community art in public advertising spaces such as billboards, phone booths, and bus terminals.He began Twin Flames in 2017 as a traditional photography series depicting sets of twins, later expanding the idea to include triplets, quadruplets, a twin whose sibling had died, and other unconventional pairings.,In 2021 he released 100 works from the series as NFTs.That October, Bahareh & Farzaneh Safarani #83, the first photographic NFT offered at a Christie's auction,sold for $1.1 million.His series Smoke and Mirrors depicts 78 subjects, including artists, astrologers, psychics, tarot readers, and mystics, each embodying a tarot card, with each NFT originally paired with a physical twin. As creator royalties began disappearing from major NFT platforms, Aversano started buying back pieces from that collection to maintain control over its legacy.
His work entered the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's collection of digital art.He also participated in Artnet's inaugural NFT auction, “Beginnings”, in December 2021.By 2022 he described Quantum.Art as “my NFT platform”.
Between 2023 and 2024 Aversano made Moments of the Unknown, a year-long project of ten-second Super 8 film portraits shot across all fifty US states and all seven continents, under a rule never to shoot two portraits in one day. Its soundtrack draws on audio from the 1977 Voyager Golden Record. During the same period he began incorporating AI into his practice, first in the project Atlas, and later by using AI to enhance film stills before turning them into silkscreen layers for hand-painted works. In 2026 the project became the subject of a solo exhibition, “Moments of the Unknown”, curated by Marlene Corbun at Nguyen Wahed in New York.
