Janna Ireland

Janna Ireland is a Los Angeles-based artist, and an assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Occidental College. In 2024, her mid-career survey, Janna Ireland: True Story Index, was jointly hosted by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara. In April 2027, the exhibition will travel to the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth. In 2016, she began photographing structures designed by legendary Black architect Paul R. Williams. A collection of 250 of these photographs was published in a monograph entitled Regarding Paul R. Williams: A Photographer’s View, in 2020. In August 2026, Regarding Paul R. Williams will be republished with additional images made after the original was released. 

Ireland’s photographs are held in the permanent collections of institutions including LACMA, SFMOMA, the Nevada Museum of Art, the California African American Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago. She is the recipient of the 2024 Julius Shulman Institute Award for Excellence in Photography, the 2023 Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Art Prize, and a 2023 City of Los Angeles Independent Master Artist Program (COLA-IMAP) grant. She holds an MFA from the UCLA Department of Art and a BFA from the Department of Photography and Imaging at NYU.

Photo credit: Photo by Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post