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Lisa Kereszi was born in 1973 in Pennsylvania and grew up in Suburban Philadelphia to a father who ran the family auto junkyard and to a mother who owned an antique shop. In 1995 she graduated from Bard College with a Bachelor of Arts, finally settling on a concentration in Photography after double-majoring in that and in Literature/Creative Writing.

After college she moved to New York City and worked as an assistant to Nan Goldin. In 2000 she received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Yale University School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut. She has been on the faculty there as a Lecturer since 2004, and also as Acting Director of Undergraduate Studies in Photography. She was appointed Critic and also Director of Undergraduate Studies in Art in 2013. She has also taught at the International Center of Photography and School of Visual Arts and has been a visiting artist/critic at the Yale School of Architecture, NYU, Massachusetts College of Art, Parsons, School of Visual Arts, Vassar, UNC Chapel Hill, Eastern Tenn. State and others. She has traveled to Central Asia to teach a group of artists through an exchange program through CEC Arts Link, and was an artist-in-residence at a program at Atlantic Center for the Arts in Summer 2005, at Lake Balaton in Hungary in 2006, and at Chashama North in 2007.

Her work is in many private collections and in that of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Altoids Curiously Strong Collection of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Norton Museum of Art and the Yale University Art Gallery. Her work has been shown in group shows at the Whitney Museum, the Aldrich Museum, the Bronx Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Queens Museum of Art, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Urban Center Gallery at the Municipal Art Society in New York, Hunter College and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. She had a solo show in May 2002 and again in March 2003 at Pierogi in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the latter of which traveled to the Yale Summer School of Art in Norfolk, Connecticut. She is represented by Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York, where she had Winter 2005, Spring 2007, Spring 2009, and Spring 2012 solo shows. Other solo shows include the Galleries at Moore College in Philadelphia, the Alcott Gallery at University of North Carolina in Fall 2006 and also at the Matrix Gallery at UC Berkeley, the latter as part of the 2005 Baum Award for Emerging American Photographers.

Her editorial work has appeared in books and magazines, including The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Nest, New York, Harper’s, W, The London Telegraph Sunday Magazine, Details, GQ, Black Book, Jane, Newsweek, House & Garden, Penthouse, Nylon, zingmagazine, Flaunt, wallpaper* and others. She was included in the 2003 list of the 30 top emerging photographers by Photo District News, and was granted a commission to photograph Governor’s Island by the Public Art Fund in 2003, which culminated in shows at the Urban Center Gallery and the Mayor’s Office at City Hall and an exhibition catalog.

Three monographs are in print—one with Nazraeli Press in Fall 2009, and two with Damiani Editore: Fantasies in Spring 2008, and Joe’s Junk Yard in 2012.

Kereszi lives and works in New Haven, CT.