About the Artist
Deborah Luster is best known for her long-term documentary/archive series, One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana, (with poet C.D. Wright) a photographic archive of formal portraits of prisoners from Louisiana prisons including the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola; and Tooth for an Eye: A Choreography of Violence in Orleans Parish, a photographic archive of cityscapes documenting locations in New Orleans where homicides have been committed. Twin Palms Publishing published monographs of both collections. Luster’s awards include a 2017 Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellowship, a Robert Gardner Fellowship from the Peabody Museum, Harvard; a Robert Rauschenberg Residency, a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship; the 1858 Prize for Contemporary Southern Art; an S.J. Weiler Foundation Award; Irish Museum of Modern Art Artist’s Residency; the Dorothea Lange—Paul Taylor Prize for Documentary Photography from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University; an Anonymous Was a Woman Award; the John Guttman Award; the Bucksbaum Family Award for American Photography; and a Peter S. Reed Foundation Award. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the National Gallery of American Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Smithsonian American Art Museum; New Orleans Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Pier 24, San Francisco; the Margulies Collection, Miami; and other notable public and private collections.