Discipline: Visual Art – photography

Ellen Brooks

Discipline: Visual Art – photography
Region: New York, NY
MacDowell Fellowships: 1998, 2002

Ellen Brooks is an American photographer whose work has been included in several recent contemporary photography exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe. She began her studies in sculpture and photography at the University of Wisconsin in Madison but completed her B.A. at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1968. Brooks also earned her M.A. in 1970 and her M.F.A. in 1971 from the same school. Her first solo exhibition took place at the University of Nevada Art Gallery in Las Vegas in 1976. Her teaching experience includes the San Francisco Art Institute from 1973 to 1982 and the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University since 1984. Brooks creates large impressionistic color photographs. Using commercial images from books, magazines, and other sources, she uses acrylics to paint the images and then re-photographs them through a diffusion screen, which results in mysterious, almost unreadable images that appear as points of colored light against a black background.

Studios

Alexander

Ellen Brooks worked in the Alexander studio.

Originally designed to be a visual art gallery, this facility was built in memory of the late John White Alexander (1856-1915) and funded by Elizabeth Alexander and their son James. John White Alexander was highly regarded as a portrait painter and, in the early part of the 20th century, served…

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