​

Katy Grannan

Photographer and filmmaker Katy Grannan first caught the attention of art critics in 1998 with her series of intimate portraits of strangers recruited from ads she placed in suburban newspapers in the Northeastern United States. After moving to California in 2006, she continued to photograph strangers– people she met on the streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles. Grannan's unique approach and the resulting, unvarnished portraits are evidence of both a profound connection between strangers and a more complicated version of The American Dream. 

 

Grannan's work as a director and cinematographer is a natural, equally poetic extension of her still photography. Her first feature film, The Nine, is an intimate look at an America most people would rather ignore. Remarkably, with an empathetic and artful eye, Grannan denies us our voyeuristic impulses and inspires feelings of commonality in place of judgment. American Interior is an on-going series of short films featuring a wide cast of characters from middle America.

 

Grannan's photographs appear in numerous private and public collections including The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She is also a long-time contributor to The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker.  

 

Katy earned a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and an MFA from the Yale School of Art. She currently lives and works in Berkley, California.