Shari Diamond

Shari Diamond is a queer American feminist photographic artist and educator whose work investigates borders and boundaries, sexuality, gender, mortality, impermanence, and human relations. Through photography and digital technology, Diamond reflects deeply on what intrigues or unsettles them, using process as a central means of exploration. Each project begins by identifying the most effective artistic methods for inquiry, resulting in work that is consistently photo-based yet diverse in its analog and digital approaches.

Born in Miami Beach, Florida, Diamond earned an M.A. in Photography from New York University/International Center of Photography. Their most recent project, Time Passes, is in the collection of the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA. Their exhibition record spans national and international venues, including the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, Leslie-Lohman Museum, Bureau of General Services Queer Division, Holland Tunnel Newburgh, and the touring Art After Stonewall, which traveled to the Leslie-Lohman Museum and Grey Art Gallery in New York, the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum in Miami, and the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio. Their photographs have also been featured on the television series Succession and the pilot Dietland.

Diamond’s work appears in publications such as Queer Holdings: A Survey of the Leslie-Lohman Museum Collection, Art After Stonewall, 1969–1989, Women Artists’ Self-Portraiture in the Twentieth Century, and Forbidden Subjects: Self-Portraits by Lesbian Artists. Their photographs are held in the permanent collections of the Leslie-Lohman Museum, The New School Archives and Special Collections, and private collections.

They have twice received the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Photography, were awarded a New York State Legislature Arts & Culture Project Grant, and have held residencies at Blue Mountain Center, Saltonstall Arts Colony, and the Millay Colony for the Arts.

Equally committed to fostering creative community, Diamond has a long history of building platforms for artists. They co-founded and directed 494 Gallery (1991–95), a cooperative of sixteen women artists working with photographic media in New York City, and later co-founded and led Pulse Art Gallery (1995–97), a membership-based gallery also in New York. Today, they are an active member of the Women Photographers Collective of the Hudson Valley and have curated several group exhibitions in their Carriage House in Newburgh, NY.