Paul Cava was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1949.  While at The New School for Social Research in 1965, Cava studied poetry with Jose Garcia Villa.  He received his BA in Cinematography from Richmond College CUNY in 1972 and his MFA in Photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology, NY in 1975.  After graduate school, Cava moved to Philadelphia, and worked as artist, independent curator, publisher and private dealer in 19th and 20th century photography.

As a fine artist Cava has exhibited paintings, drawings and photo-based works from 1976 to the present in galleries and museums in the United States and Europe, and his work has been collected by a broad range of private and public institutions, including The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Princeton University Museum of Art, and The Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.  His work has been featured in many publications including Eyemazing Magazing and Das Magazin.  Cava was a recipient of Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grants in 1981 and 1999.  In fall 2005, German publisher Edition Galerie Vevais released Children of Adam, a volume of Cava’s photo-based art and Walt Whitman’s poetry.

The nature of Paul Cava’s work, although intimate and highly personal in its content, has been on the forward edge of a significant hi-tech image-making trend. Since the late 1970s, up to the present time, Cava has been a proponent of crossbreeding photography with non-photographic media, such as painting, drawing, and various forms of printmaking.  For the past decade, Cava has immersed himself in new digital printing technologies, creating media hybrids difficult to imagine just ten years ago. Technically his work is achieved by combining, in various ways, paper and collage elements, painting and other systems of mark-making with digital photo output. He uses his own photography as well as found anonymous images in this unique process.

In addition to his impact as a fine artist, Cava is notable for the two decades (1979-1999) during which he owned and operated the Paul Cava Gallery.  The gallery was, for Philadelphia, a unique showcase for cutting edge photography, painting and sculpture.  Cava brought to local and national attention a number of important emerging and, at times, controversial photographers, including Robert Mapplethorpe, Ray Metzker Joel-Peter Witkin, Lynn Davis, Jock Sturges, Sally Mann, Lee Friedlander, Irving Penn, John Divola and Richard Misrach.  The gallery also showed Sean Scully, Jannis Kounellis, Mel Bochner and Robert Morris.  Cava continues to work as a private photography dealer and publisher.