Deana Lawson

A leading photo-based artist of her generation, Deana Lawson is renowned for images that explore how communities and individuals hold space within shifting terrains of social, capital, and ecological orders. Lawson projects her own contemporary Black experience onto an expanded view of human history and cosmologies. Her gaze is both local and global, focusing on Brooklyn, the Americas, and countries connected to the African diaspora.

Lawson’s striking large-scale prints emphasize themes of the corporeal, with the body as a site of social, cultural, and cosmological inscriptions. Taking inspiration from traditions including the vernacular snapshot, social documentary, and studio portraiture, she considers the visual language of the camera and the power of representation, beauty, and defiance.

Lawson was born in 1979 in Rochester, New York. Her mother was an administrative assistant at Kodak, and her father worked at Xerox; he was also an avid family photographer, informing her early interest in the medium and the family album. She studied photography at Pennsylvania State University, graduating with a BFA in 2001, and continued her studies at the Rhode Island School of Design, earning her MFA in 2004. In 2012, Lawson joined the faculty of Princeton University, where she was named the inaugural Dorothy Krauklis ’78 Professor of Visual Arts in 2021. In 2013, she received a Guggenheim Foundation grant, facilitating her travel to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Haiti, and Jamaica.

Lawson was the recipient of the 2020 Hugo Boss Prize—the first artist working in photography to receive the award—which led to Centropy, an exhibition at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum featuring her photographs and a visual essay in the form of an eponymous film. Her first comprehensive museum survey was curated by Peter Eleey and Eva Respini, debuting at Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, in 2021, and traveling to MoMA PS1, New York (2022) and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (2022–23). In 2022, she was awarded the prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize.