Join us for a special look at the Deana Lawson exhibition with Maria Kelly, Assistant Curator of Photography at the High Museum. In this body of work which spans over two decades, Lawson employs a wide range of photographic styles to investigate and challenge conventional representations of Black identities and bodies.

Deana Lawson was born in 1979 in Rochester, New York. She is an educator and photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. 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. In 2022, she was awarded the prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize.

Featuring the work Shawntel, 2016 by Deana Lawson