Deana Lawson (b. 1979, Rochester, New York) makes photographs that explore the Black familiar and its relationship to lore, global histories, and mystery traditions. She transforms observational picture-making into a powerful mode of expression, critique, and celebration. Romance and intimacy between subjects, as well as ritual and spirituality appear throughout Lawson’s work, often within the same image. Her photographs emphasize formal approaches to film commonly associated with both Western and African twentieth-century portraiture practices, in addition to appropriation and uses of vernacular imagery. Lawson engages her subjects with intention and intuition alike, in staged situations characterized by the piercing directness of the model’s gaze. With their meticulous mise-en-scènes filled with personal artifacts and decor, these portraits underscore the psychological connections between people and their domestic spaces, fusing biography, symbolism, and cultural observation, and creating expansive images of contemporary personhood.

Lawson was the subject of a survey exhibition co-organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston and MoMA PS1, Queens, New York, which also traveled to the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (2021–2023). Other solo exhibitions of her work have been presented at institutions including Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris, France (2025); Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY (2021); Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2020); Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2019); Underground Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2018); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA (2018); Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, MO (2017); and Art Institute of Chicago, IL (2015). Lawson was awarded the 2022 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, an influential and longstanding prize that awards artists and projects that have made a significant and original contribution to the medium of photography over the preceding twelve months. She is the first artist working in photography to be awarded the prestigious Hugo Boss Prize by the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Recent group exhibitions include Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st Century Art and Poetics, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA (2024); Diaries of Home, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX (2024); Sculpting with Light: Contemporary Artists and Holography (included in PST Art: Art & Science Collide), Getty Center, Los Angeles, CA (2024); Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys, Brooklyn Museum, NY (2024); The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century, Baltimore Museum of Art, MD (2023); and Though it’s dark, still I sing, 34th Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (2021). Her work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Tate Modern, London, England; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris, France; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; and Art Institute of Chicago, IL. Lawson lives and works in Los Angeles.