Keisha Scarville

Keisha Scarville (born 1975, in Brooklyn, New York) is an American artist whose photographic practice explores loss, latency, diaspora, memory, and the elusive body. Working across photography, mixed media, and book-making, Scarville examines grief, transformation, family history, and belonging through portraiture, self-imaging, and materially resonant compositions that often blur the boundaries between presence and absence.  Scarville earned a B.S. from the Rochester Institute of Technology and studied at Parsons School of Design/The New School. Her work often engages family archive, migration, embodiment, and the emotional afterlives of personal loss, using photography, everyday objects, garments, and serial image-making to consider how identity is shaped through memory, inheritance, and the traces left by those no longer physically present. Her widely discussed series Mama’s Clothes is especially central to her practice, using her late mother’s clothing to create images that hold grief, intimacy, and diasporic belonging in tension.  Her work has been exhibited at the International Center of Photography, the Studio Museum in Harlem, ICA Philadelphia, the Brooklyn Museum, and Higher Pictures, among other venues. Her work is held in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, George Eastman Museum, the Denver Art Museum, and the Detroit Institute of Arts. She is the recipient of the 2026 Brooklyn Museum UOVO Prize, the 2024 Saltzman Prize in Photography, and the 2023 Creator Labs Photo Fund. Keisha Scarville lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.