Justine Kurland

(American, born 1969)

Justine Kurland is a contemporary American photographer. Best known for her large-scale C-prints of rural landscapes inhabited by nude women, Kurland’s surreal images evoke pagan utopias or post-apocalyptic or pre-industrial worlds. Her work often depicts communes in rural America as her subject matter, inspired by 19th-century idyllic English landscape painting, children’s fairy tales, and Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs, among others sources. Born in 1969 in Warsaw, NY, Kurland studied at the School of Visual Arts and received her MFA from Yale School of Art in 1998, where she studied under famed photographer Gregory Crewdson. She has exhibited with Mitchell-Innes & Nash gallery in New York, and her works are in the collections of the Albert-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, the Detroit Institute of the Arts, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the International Center of Photography in New York, among others. Kurland lives and works in New York, NY.