Photographers

Mona Kuhn (born 1969 in São Paulo, Brazil) is a Brazilian‑born American photographer celebrated for her contemporary reinvention of the nude and her exploration of the human figure as both physical and metaphysical presence. Known for her luminous, intimate, and painterly visual language, Kuhn works with analog and digital lens‑based media to investigate embodiment, perception, and our desire for connection. Throughout her career, she has developed close, collaborative relationships with her subjects, resulting in images rooted in trust, vulnerability, and a sense of shared humanity. Her work often balances clarity and softness, structure and atmosphere, using color, translucency, and natural light to expand the nude into psychological and symbolic space.

After moving to the United States in 1989, Kuhn studied at The Ohio State University and later at the San Francisco Art Institute. Now based in Los Angeles, she is an independent scholar at the Getty Research Institute. Over more than two decades, she has produced a series of acclaimed bodies of work, including Photographs (2004), Evidence (2007), Native (2010), Bordeaux Series (2011), Private (2014), She Disappeared into Complete Silence (2018/19), Bushes & Succulents (2018), Works (2021), and Kings Road (2022/23). Her series often weave together the human form with architecture, landscape, and abstraction, reflecting an ongoing interest in how bodies inhabit and merge with their environments. In recent years, Kuhn has expanded her practice into solarized prints, archival interventions, and conceptual meditations on memory, perception, and materiality.

Kuhn’s work has been exhibited internationally at institutions such as the Louvre Museum, Le Bal, the Royal Academy of Arts, Whitechapel Gallery, Musée de l’Elysée, the Leopold Museum, the Australian Centre for Photography, and Taipei Fine Arts Museum. Her photographs are held in major collections including the J. Paul Getty Museum, LACMA, the Hammer Museum, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and museums in Lausanne, Japan, and China. Widely recognized as one of the most influential contemporary photographers working with the nude, Kuhn received the Stieglitz Award in 2021 for her contributions to fine‑art photography. She continues to live and work in Los Angeles, creating images that meld clarity with dreamlike resonance and invite deeper contemplation of the human experience.