Draft:Orion Carloto

Vanessa Nichole Carloto (born September 9, 1996), known professionally as Orion Carloto, is an American social media personality, writer, photographer, and model. She gained traction through her Tumblr blog before she started a YouTube channel which currently has over 486 thousand subscribers and 13 million views.

Early life
Carloto was born Vanessa Nichole Carloto in Bethlehem, Georgia. She has one sister, a niece, and a nephew. She was a theater student and ran an online blog on Tumblr under the username sskeptical, where she posted her photography and poetry. After graduating high school, Carloto took a gap year and moved to New York City.

Career
In addition to her Tumblr, Carloto first gained fame through the YouTube channel OrionAndSam, which she co-ran with her best friend Sam Fazz. The channel amassed 91 thousand subscribers. In 2014, Carloto started her own channel where she uploads vlogs and short film clips. Carloto also has a large following on several social media platforms, as she has over 786 thousand followers on Instagram and 324 thousand followers on TikTok.

Carloto began modeling in 2015. She has appeared in catalogs for brands such as Miu Miu and Chanel. She made her runway debut in Han Kjøbenhavn’s FW22/23 show in Milan.

Carloto’s first poetry collection titled Flux was published by Andrews McMeel Publishing in 2017. It is illustrated by artist Katie Roberts. It garnered her praise because of its “agreeable tempo and poetic feeling that was captivating in its simplicity." In 2020, she published Film For Her, a collage of photographs, poems and short stories consisting of compositions from her formative years. The collection started as a visual diary for herself through her “penchant for romanticizing life.”

In December 2023, Carloto curated an exhibition titled A Room of One’s Own, which included displays of some of her own photography alongside works from Meghann Stephenson, Marguerite Chapel, and the Joan Didion Estate. In that same month, Carloto also released the limited-run zine Beds I’ve Slept In, a collection of photographs of rooms she has stayed in throughout her travels across the world. She says this collection arose spontaneously after she noticed that she had unintentionally been capturing her bedrooms since she was 16 years old.

Personal life
Orion Carloto came out as bisexual in 2016. She began dating Internet personality Brittenelle Fredericks in 2017, but the two later split up. She is currently dating artist Jonathan Hepfer.

Carloto resides in Los Angeles, California.

Public image
Carloto is more recognized for her aesthetic curation on social media accounts than she is for her writing, which provides her with access to a better “insight into the creation and production of art in the various media.” She has said that while she began writing poetry first, she is currently more attuned to her photography.

She is also criticized for what some consider flat writing and online performativity, calling her inauthentic as her “carefully orchestrated her lifestyle—the clothing she wore, the events she attended, and the photos she posted into an aesthetic [...] had the potential to be commodified."

Works

 * 2017: Flux (Andrews McMeel Publishing) ISBN 9781449489458
 * 2020: Film For Her (Andrews McMeel Publishing) ISBN 9781524853778