About
I am a conceptual documentary artist who returned to visual expression in 2014 after a 12-year career as a wrongful conviction lawyer. My values as an advocate and trained mediator, as well as my background representing innocent DNA exonerees, inform my visual work, which examines American power and identity in the post-9/11 era. My series marry empathy and dark humor with structural critique, combining photographs, archival material, testimony, and sound.
While completing a Bachelor's degree in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, I studied photography at RISD. After working for photographers Mary Ellen Mark and Sylvia Plachy, as an AP stringer, and as an investigator for the federal public defender's office, I attended Harvard Law School and practiced for more than a decade as a civil rights attorney.
I have been honored with a Harpo Foundation Visual Artist Grant, a Center for Emerging Visual Artists Fellowship, the Duke University's Archive of Documentary Arts Collection Award for Women Documentarians, the Lianzhou (China) Foto Festival Punctum Award and inaugural Fotofest Charles Jing Fellowship (both juried exhibition prizes), and a nomination for the Baum Award for an Emerging American Photographer.
My first book, Welcome to Camp America: Inside Guantánamo Bay (Radius, 2017), is a 2018 PDN Annual Publisher's Choice Award winner, 2018 ICP Infinity Award nominee, longlisted for the 2018 Kraszna-Krausz Foundation Book Award, shortlisted for the 2017 Paris Photo-Aperture First PhotoBook Prize and les Rencontres de la Photographie d'Arles Photo-Text Book Award, and named among 2017's 10 best photo books by Teju Cole in the New York Times Magazine, among others. I have lectured or exhibited in France, Switzerland, Germany, England, Lebanon, China, South Korea, Australia, at UN Headquarters, New York's Steven Kasher Gallery, and in university, community, and fine-art spaces across the U.S.
Subscribe to my mailing list here. If you would like to exhibit or acquire my work or invite me to speak or collaborate, please email me at debi@debicornwall.com. Follow me @debicornwall (IG/Twitter) and @debicornwallphoto (FB).