Deborah Luster
Deborah Luster (b. 1951) is a visual artist from Northwest Arkansas, who moved into photography in 1989 as a way of coping with the death of her grandmother and the murder of her mother. She is best known for her long-term documentary projects, which often explore violence and its aftermath. For example, Luster’s Tooth for an Eye: A Chorography of Violence in Orleans Parish, serves as an archive of contemporary and historical sites of homicide in New Orleans.
She has authored three books and has been the recipient of many prizes, including a Guggenheim Fellowship; a Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography from the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University; a Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellowship award; a Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant; and the 2001 Dorothea Lange—Paul Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, among others. Luster’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston); the New Orleans Museum of Art; and other notable public and private collections.