Dylan Hausthor is a conjurer of stories of dreaming and reality. They use photography, video, and installation to explore the complexities of the human condition in relationship to the natural world. Fact and fable, innocence and cunning, the spectacle and mystery of the seen and unseen. Their images imply dramas suspended, acts disrupted, and stories whispered, narratives woven with the miraculous and mundane. “Photography’s ability to promote belief is a power not dissimilar to that of faith,” they say. “I hope for these images to act as tarot cards, and the viewers exist as the medium between fiction and reality—to push past questions of validity that form the base tradition of colonialism in storytelling and folklore and into a much more human sense of reality: faulted, broken, and real.”

Hausthor received their BFA from the Maine College of Art and Design and MFA from the Yale School of Art. They are a 2024 recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Award, and a 2021 Hariban Award Honorable Mention, a 2019 recipient of a Nancy Graves Fellowship for Visual Artists, and a winner of Burn Magazine’s Emerging Photographer Fund Grant. In 2022-2023, they were a Lunder Fellow at Colby College, and in summer 2024, they will attend the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. They have been an artist-in-residence at the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, the Penumbra Foundation, and Light Work. They have also been a runner-up for the Aperture Portfolio Prize, nominated for Prix Pictet 2021, and a W. Eugene Smith Grant finalist. Their work has been shown nationally and internationally, and they have three books in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. They work teaching ghost hunting, ritual, photography, and mushroom foraging. They live in mid-coast Maine.