Biography
With an interest in Art and Science, Susan kae Grant is a Texas based artist exploring dreams, memory and the unconscious using the shadow as metaphor to create fabricated narratives and shadow portraits. Grant has lectured and exhibited her work throughout the United States, Canada,  China, Europe, Australia, British Columbia, Africa, Guatemala, and Japan. She is on the staff of the International Center of Photography (NYC) where she has taught photographic bookmaking workshops each spring since 1993.

Process
To create her images, Grant photographs shadows of models and props in her Dallas studio using a 4x5 view camera with a digital Leaf back. The gestures and narratives in the images take inspiration from sleep laboratory research, dream recordings, memory and journal sketches. The printed images consist of limited edition photographs printed on Hahnemüle 308 Rag, a 100% cotton museum-quality paper. The combination of the paper surface and dark color palette illuminates the emotional quality of the work. To see a video documentation and Hahnemüle endorsement of a set being created in the studio, go to: http://www.susankaegrant.com/skg864px.mp4. 

Book Art
Under the press name, The Black Rose Press, Grant has produced eleven limited edition artists’ books incorporating photographic images and text with letterpress and digital technologies on fine art and handmade papers. In 2005, in collaboration with Graphic designer, Randal Hill, she produced Shadowed Memory during an artist residency at Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York. A selection of Grant’s curatorial projects related to Book Arts include, Photographic Book Art in the United States, which toured to seventeen venues throughout the USA from 1991-1995, and The Book Reconfigured, a survey of women book artists residing in Texas which toured to two Texas venues in 1995-1996.

Public Collections

  • Boston Athenaeum

  • Center for Creative Photography (Tucson)

  • Columbia University

  • Detroit Public Library

  • Frito Lay Corporate Collection

  • The George Eastman House

  • The J. Paul Getty Museum

  • Kresge Art Museum at Michigan State

  • The Minneapolis Art Institute

  • Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

  • New York Public Library (Spencer Collection)

  • Phoenix Public Library (Rare Book Collection)

  • The Smithsonian Institution Library (Special Collections)

  • The Tokyo Museum of Photography

  • The Victoria and Albert Museum Library

Awards of Excellence

  • Julia Margaret Cameron Award For Women Photographers (2017)

  • 2017 Clarence John Laughlin Award (Finalist)

  • PhotoNola Review Prize 2nd & 3rd Place (2017 & 2014)

  • Critical Mass Top 50, Photolucida (2014)

  • Black & White Spider Award (2012)

  • Discoveries of the Meeting Place, Houston Fotofest (2002)

Publication Features

  • !!! The New York Times LightBox… correct title? !!!

  • Diffusion Magazine

  • Adore Noir

  • Black + White Photography

  • PhotoVideoEDU

  • Smithsonian Magazine

  • D Magazine

  • FotoMAGAZIN 

Books featuring Grant's work

  • The Elements of Photography (Focal Press)

  • Launching the Imagination (McGraw Hill Education) 

  • Photography 4.0: A Teaching Guide for the

  • 21st Century (Focal Press)

  • Exploring Color Photography (Focal Press)

  • The Century of Artists' Books (Granary Books)

  • Neither Man Nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals (Lantern Books)

  • The Sexual Politics of Meat (Bloomsbury Academic)

  • Structure of the Visual Book (Keith Smith Books)

  • Photographic Possibilities (Focal Press)

  • The Focal Press Companion to the Constructed Image in Contemporary Photography (Routledge)