Zoe Strauss

Zoe Strauss (born 1970) is an American photographer and installation artist living and working in Philadelphia. Strauss states that her ambition is “to create an epic narrative that reflects the beauty and struggle of everyday life.” Strauss founded the Philadelphia Public Art Project in 1995, and did not begin to use the camera as a means to represent her chosen subject matter until 2000. In 2012, Strauss was featured in a solo exhibition at Philadelphia Museum of Art, Zoe Strauss: Ten Years. The mid-career retrospectives was the first critical assessment of Under I-95: a decade-long street photography project that included an annual installation of photographs beneath a section of Interstate 95 in South Philadelphia.

Strauss is the recipient of many awards for her photography, including a Seedling Award from the Leeway Foundation (2002), a Pew Fellowship (2005), the George Gund Foundation Fellowship (2007), and is a member of the prestigious Magnum Photos cooperative. Strauss was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial and was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia, 2006). Her first monograph, America, was published in 2008.