Occupation Photographer | ||
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Nationality United States of America Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, US & Canada | ||
Artist talk deana lawson
Deana Lawson (1979, born in Rochester, New York), is an American photographer and arts educator.
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Lecture by deana lawson
Background
She attended Penn State and earned a B.F.A in 2001, and later in 2004 received a M.F.A from the Rhode Island School of Design. Lawson started teaching at Princeton in 2012. Lawson currently lives and works in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn. She was previously married to painter Aaron Gilbert and together they have a son named Judah. Lawson has said to have been influenced by Gilbert's artwork, and much of Gilbert's early artwork depicts of the family including Lawson and their child.
Work
Deana Lawson's work ranges from found photographs to carefully composed portraits. Her primary focus is to create portraits that explore themes of intimacy, the family, and the different ways in which the corporeal form can convey selfhood. Lawson's subjects are all strangers, initially just from her Brooklyn neighborhood. However, after receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013, she was able to travel to places such as Louisiana, Haiti, The Democratic Republic of Congo, Jamaica and Ethiopia to photograph more subjects there, and thus further explore the idea of global an African diasporic familial identity. Lawson utilizes nudity within many of her portraits, creating large scale nude portraits that are both intimate and confrontational.
In 2013, Lawson was awarded the Guggenheim fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Exhibitions
Lawson has exhibited her art at a variety of institutions, including:
