Deana Lawson

Photographer Deana Lawson shoots intimate staged portraits that explore Blackness, legacy, and collective memory. Her pictures, which reflect both actual histories and contrived narratives, focus exclusively on Black subjects posed in richly detailed environments and interiors. Lawson, who received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, draws on visual traditions such as photographic and figurative portraiture, social documentary, and the vernacular archives of family photo albums. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, among others. Lawson currently teaches photography at Princeton University.