faculty
Juan Orrantia
A man posing.
faculty

Juan Orrantia

Juan Orrantia approaches photographic practice as a reflexive interrogation of histories and experiences of looking and being seen. Working through color, appropriation, mixed media and the photobook, his work builds on photography’s limits and possibilities, as strategies for unsettling canons and representations. After receiving the Fiebre Dummy Award he published Like Stains of Red Dirt (Dalpine, 2020), and A Machete Pelao will soon be published by the Centro de Fotografia de Montevideo—Latin American Photobook Award. Self-published books are in collections of the Smithsonian Museum of African Art Library, Biblioteca de Arte Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, and The Ginsberg Center for the Book, and Is ThisTomorrow, a collective experimental publication was shortlisted for the Photobook Awards Arles (2019). He has been awarded grants from the Smithsonian Institution, The Tierney Fellowship, and various fellowships and residencies. Reviews of his work have appeared in Aperture, Nearest Truth, British Journal of Photography, and Africa is a Country, among others.

Juan was born in Colombia and lives in Johannesburg, South Africa, lecturing at various universities and photo institutions. He holds an MFA in Photography from Hartford Art School and a Phd in Anthropology.