Susan kae Grant is an American lens-based artist, educator, and early advocate of photographic book arts. She was born in 1954 in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, and earned a BS and an MFA in photography and book arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work combines photography, constructed scenes, shadows, memory, and dream research, often exploring the space between what we see and what exists in the mind.
From 1981 to 2017 she was Head of Photography & Book Arts at Texas Woman’s University, and in 2018 she was named Cornaro Professor of Visual Art, Emerita. Her photographs and artist’s books are held in collections including the J. Paul Getty Museum, the George Eastman Museum, the Center for Creative Photography, the Smithsonian Institution, the Tokyo Photographic Museum, and the Victoria & Albert National Art Library.
Her book Night Journey (MW Editions, 2026) gathers 89 black-and-white photographs made since 2000. The work began in the early 1990s in the sleep laboratory of Dr. John Herman at UT Southwestern Medical Center, where she was woken during REM sleep to describe her dreams. She builds the scenes from shadows, models, and props in her Dallas studio, photographing them with a 4x5 view camera and a digital back. She lives and works in Dallas, Texas. (Website, Instagram, Facebook)
