About
Debi Cornwall is a Canadian-American artist who returned to visual expression after a 12-year career as a civil-rights lawyer. In still and moving images, sound, testimony, text, and archival material, she examines cultural mythmaking: the staging and performance of power, the fictions used to manage difficult truths.
While completing a degree in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, Debi 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, she attended Harvard Law School and practiced as a wrongful conviction attorney for more than a decade, also training as a mediator. Exhaustive research and negotiation were critical to her advocacy and remain integral to her visual practice.
As the laureate of the 2023 Prix Elysée, the biennial juried contemporary photography prize created by the Photo Elysée Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland, Debi completed Model Citizens, now a book in English and French editions (Radius/Textuel). It's the last of her trilogy of photobooks about the post-9/11 American condition. The Model Citizens exhibition, which includes work from Necessary Fictions and the found-footage short, Pineland/Hollywood, premiered at the 2024 Rencontres d'Arles festival and went on to Fotofestiwal Łódź (Poland) in 2025.
Debi is a 2024 NYSCA Individual Artist Grantee in film, a 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in photography, and inaugural Leica Women Foto Project Awardee, among other honors, and has been nominated for the Prix Pictet, the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, and the Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome. Her work has been profiled in publications including Art in America, European Photography Magazine, British Journal of Photography, the New York Times Magazine, Le Monde, Hyperallergic, and the Brooklyn Rail, and is held in public collections such as LACMA, Photo Elysée (Switzerland), Musée de la Photographie à Charleroi (Belgium), Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Harvard Art Museums, and the Bibliotèque National de France.
As an ICP faculty member, Debi teaches students how to plumb deeper layers in their work. She also consults independently with artists developing long-term projects.
Subscribe to Debi's mailing list for occasional updates here. If you would like to exhibit, screen, or acquire her work or invite her to collaborate, consult, mentor, speak, or teach, please email Debi at debi@debicornwall.com.