Janna Ireland lives in Los Angeles, where she is an assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Occidental College. Her photographic work is primarily concerned with the themes of family, home, and the expression of Black identity in American culture.
Her 2024 mid-career survey, “Janna Ireland: True Story Index,” was jointly hosted by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara. In 2016, she began photographing structures designed by legendary Black architect Paul R. Williams. A collection of 250 of these photographs was published in a monograph entitled Regarding Paul R. Williams: A Photographer’s View, in 2020. In 2021, Ireland was awarded a Peter E. Pool Research Fellowship by the Nevada Museum of Art to photograph Williams’ work in Nevada. A broad selection of Ireland’s work was included in the exhibition “Family Album: Dannielle Bowman, Janna Ireland and Contemporary Works from LACMA” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Charles White Elementary School Gallery.
Ireland’s photographs are held in the permanent collections of institutions including LACMA, SFMOMA, the Nevada Museum of Art, the California African American Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago. She is the recipient of the 2023 Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Art Prize, a 2023 City of Los Angeles Independent Master Artist Program (COLA-IMAP) grant, and is a 2024 runner-up for the Aperture Portfolio Prize. Her work has been the subject of articles in publications including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times, Harvard Design Magazine, and Aperture. She holds an MFA from the UCLA Department of Art and a BFA from the Department of Photography and Imaging at NYU.
Instagram: @jannaireland