Dana Lixenberg

Dana Luxenberg (Amsterdam - 1964) studied at the London College of Printing and the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. From 1989 to 2018 she was based in New York; now she lives and works in Amsterdam.

Dana is known for her intimate portraits of individuals and communities, often from the margins of society, which she captures with a large format field camera. It is important to Dana that each portrait tells a unique story in itself and that she can project something of herself onto that portrait. As she studies her subject and edits the composition, she creates a moment of suspended intimacy. The exposure and vulnerability of her subjects, regardless of their background, creates something magical.

Lixenberg often commits to long-term projects with a focus on marginalized communities. Examples include Jeffersonville, Indiana (2005), in which she portrayed homeless people in the town of the same name, and The Last Days of Shishmaref (2008), a portrait of an Inupiaq community on an island along the coast of Alaska that is slowly but surely disappearing into the sea. In 2015, Lixenberg's life's work Imperial Courts, 1993-2015, a project about the residents of a social housing complex in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. For this book, Lixenberg was awarded the prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize (2017).