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Gregory Crewdson ’85

Gregory Crewdson was born in 1962 in Brooklyn, New York. He is also a graduate of the Yale University School of Art, where he is now director of graduate studies in photography.

Crewdson’s career has spanned three decades. His work has been exhibited widely in the United States and Europe and is featured in many public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.

His most widely acclaimed bodies of work have been Natural Wonder (1992–97), Twilight (1998–2002), Dream House (a 2002 commission by the New York Times Magazine), Beneath the Roses (2003–08), and Sanctuary (2009). His most recent body of work, Cathedral of the Pines (2013–14), opened at Gagosian, West 21st Street, New York, in early 2016. Comprising thirty-one digital pigment prints, this series was made during three productions in and around the rural town of Becket, Massachusetts. A fully illustrated book with an essay by art historian Alexander Nemerov was released by Aperture in conjunction with the exhibition.

Beneath the Roses, a series of pictures that took nearly ten years to complete—with a crew totaling more than one hundred people—was the subject of the 2012 feature documentary Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters, by Ben Shapiro.

A retrospective of Crewdson’s work produced between 1985 and 2005 toured European museums from 2005 to 2008 and was accompanied by a fully illustrated book published by Hatje Cantz. The exhibition In a Lonely Place traveled to galleries and museums across Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, and New Zealand in 2013. The major monograph Gregory Crewdson was published by Rizzoli the same year.

Crewdson’s awards include the Skowhegan Medal for Photography, a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship, and the Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellowship.

—From gagosian.com

In 2013, Crewdson was given the Distinguished Alumni Award by Purchase College.