Biography:

Hannah Smith Allen works across photography, text, printmaking, book arts, and moving images to explore how American history and lore shape the American landscape and its people, both individually and collectively. Central to her practice is a fascination with image materiality: the pixels, ink, Ben-Day dots, and paper that contribute to visual history and meaning.

Allen has received significant recognition for her work, including the 2007 Individual Photographer’s Fellowship from the Aaron Siskind Foundation, a 2010 Artist Fellowship in Photography from the New York Foundation for the Arts, a 2011 A.I.M. Fellowship at the Bronx Museum of Art, and a 2013 Fellowship at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn. She has completed residencies at the Lower East Side Printshop and the Vermont Studio Center, and her work has been exhibited at venues across the United States, including the Phoenix Art Museum, Wave Hill Cultural Center, and SF Camerawork. Her book Borderlands (2021), published by VSW Press (Rochester, New York), is held in artist book collections across the country, including Columbia University, UCLA, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, and The Center for Book Arts in New York. In addition to her studio practice, Allen writes on contemporary photography, with essays appearing in American Photo and Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism.

Allen is an Associate Professor of Photography and Digital Media at Adelphi University. She holds degrees from the School of Visual Arts and the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2025, she was awarded a Mid-Career Artist Fellowship from BAXTER ST at CCNY and presented her solo exhibition On Broken Ground at BAXTER ST Gallery in spring 2026. She is currently serving as Resident Artist for the Erie Canal, a collaboration between the Erie Canal Museum and the New York State Power Authority. As part of this residency, she is developing a new exhibition on the canal, scheduled to open in spring 2027 at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York.

Info

Hannah Smith Allen • Artist • Image Maker • Photographer

hannahsmithallen@me.com