Deana Lawson

Deana Lawson (born 1979, in Rochester, New York) is an American artist whose photographic practice explores Black intimacy, identity, spirituality, desire, family, and the visual politics of representation across the African diaspora. Working across staged portraiture, large-scale photography, moving image, and assemblage, Lawson examines the emotional and symbolic dimensions of Black life through carefully composed tableaux, vernacular references, and a richly cinematic attention to gesture, space, and adornment.  Lawson studied photography at Pennsylvania State University, where she received her BFA in 2001, and later earned her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2004. Her work often engages portraiture, social history, family album aesthetics, spirituality, and diasporic visual culture, using staged interiors, found imagery, and highly choreographed compositions to consider beauty, vulnerability, power, and the contradictions of photographic truth. She is also the inaugural Dorothy Krauklis ’78 Professor of Visual Arts at Princeton University.  Her work has been exhibited at MoMA PS1, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, the High Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art. She received the Hugo Boss Prize in 2020, becoming the first photographer to win the award, and has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Aaron Siskind Fellowship Grant, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant. Lawson lives and works between New York and Los Angeles.