DEBORAH LUSTER (b. 1951, Bend, OR) lives and works in New Orleans.
Deborah Luster’s most recent body of work, One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana, is a collection of more than 1,000 photographs of inmates from three different state penitentiaries in Louisiana. The project was sparked by her own mother’s murder and aided in the artist’s healing and understanding of the event.
Deborah Luster has exhibited in venues such as the Corcoran Museum of Art, Washington, D.C., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Houston Center for Photography, TX. She is the recipient of The Dorothea Lange—Paul Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, The John Gutmann Award, The Bucksbaum Family Award for American Photography, and an Anonymous Was a Woman Award. Her work has been collected by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Los Angeles County Museum, and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, among others. Her monograph, One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana (Twin Palms Publishing), was selected by both the New York Times and the Village Voice as one of the top photography books of 2003.
Luster is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery in New York.