Carolyn Drake

Carolyn Drake is a photographer and multidisciplinary artist whose long-term, photo-based projects seek to question dominant historical narratives and creatively reimagine them. Her practice emphasizes collaboration and, in recent years, has expanded to include sewing, collage, and sculpture. Through her work, Drake explores the boundaries between author and subject, the real and the imagined, challenging fixed binaries and traditional notions of storytelling in photography.

Born in California, Drake studied Media/Culture and History at Brown University in the early 1990s. After graduating in 1994, she moved to New York, where she worked for several years as an interactive designer before turning to photography as a way to more directly engage with the physical and social world.

Between 2007 and 2013, Drake traveled extensively throughout Central Asia from her base in Istanbul to complete two major projects. Two Rivers (2013) examines the interwoven relationships between ecology, culture, and political power along the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers. Wild Pigeon (2014) combines photography, drawing, and embroidery created in collaboration with Uyghur communities in western China. This body of work was acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) in 2018 and featured in a six-month solo exhibition at the museum.

Her later projects continue to explore collaboration and identity. In Internat (2014–2017), she worked with young women in a former Soviet orphanage to produce photographs and paintings that transcend the constraints of the institution and societal gender expectations. Knit Club (TBW Books, 2020), created in partnership with an enigmatic women’s group in Mississippi, was shortlisted for the Aperture/Paris Photo Book of the Year Award.

Now based in California, Drake is developing more introspective projects rooted in her local environment. Her recent work, Isolation Therapy, was featured in the SFMOMA exhibition Close to Home: Creativity in Crisis (2020).

Drake is the recipient of numerous honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Anamorphosis Prize, and a Peter S. Reed Foundation grant. She is a member of Magnum Photos, and her work has been published in The New Yorker, Aperture, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times Magazine.