Deana Lawson (b. 1979, Rochester, NY, lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and Brooklyn, NY) 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). 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 and Brooklyn.