Bio

Emma Ressel (b. Bar Harbor, ME) is an artist working with large format film photography to make still life images with natural history collections. Her images aim to complicate the boundaries between dead versus alive, nature versus artifice, and beauty versus the grotesque. She is currently collaborating with biologists to problematize ideas around animal preservation and explore how science processes and institutions reveal our desire for proximity with nature.

Ressel earned her BA in Photography at Bard College and is currently an MFA candidate in Photography at the University of New Mexico. She has completed residencies at Lugoland in Lugo, Italy and at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City. She has been awarded the 2022 Film Photo Student Project Award, 13th Still Life Pollux Award, Magenta Foundation Flash Forward 2019, and the Stinnett Philadelphia Museum of Art Collection Award. She currently holds a fellowship at the Center for Regional Studies at UNM and is a 2023-2024 Emerging Artist Member at Strata Gallery in Santa Fe, NM.

Ressel’s first photobook, Olives in the street, was published by Edizione del bradipo in 2017. She has contributed photography to publications including The New Yorker, Refinery 29, and Philadelphia Magazine, amongst others. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She currently lives in Albuquerque, NM, where in addition to working toward her MFA, she teaches photography at the University of New Mexico.