Nona Faustine, a Brooklyn-born photographer acclaimed for her fearless self-portraits and incisive explorations of American history, has died at 48. The Brooklyn Museum, which hosted her first institutional solo show in 2024, confirmed her passing. The cause of death was not publicly disclosed.
Faustine’s practice centered on reclaiming visibility for Black women in the United States. Often working with self-portraiture, she used images of her own body to address legacies of slavery, gendered oppression, and historical omission. “I live in a city and a country that are filled with monuments and icons of all sorts—mostly to white men,” Faustine told Artsy in 2016. “They convey their history. It’s a one-sided legacy.” Her work demanded recognition of the stories often left out of public memory.
Her best-known body of work, the series “White Shoes,” began in 2012. In these images, Faustine photographed herself nude except for white heels at former slave auction sites and burial grounds across New York City, including Wall Street and Harlem. The series was directly inspired by Sarah Baartman, a South African woman exhibited in 19th-century Europe as a spectacle, and sought to draw attention to the overlooked role of slavery in the city’s development. The 2024 Brooklyn Museum exhibition brought together works from this series for the first time at an institutional level.
Faustine often focused her lens on national landmarks, such as the Statue of Liberty or the Washington Monument, cropping or obscuring them to question the dominant historical narratives they represent. “It seemed as if freedom, in that picture, was disappearing,” she said of one image taken of the Statue of Liberty from the Staten Island Ferry.
Born in 1977 and raised in Crown Heights, Faustine was immersed in photography from an early age thanks to her father and uncle, both hobbyists. She earned a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1997 and later an MFA from the International Center of Photography at Bard College. Her early works, such as the series “Mitochondria,” centered on the women in her family and their intergenerational narratives. Later projects took on broader histories, including the series “Say Her Name” (2016), a tribute to Sandra Bland, a Black woman who died in a jail cell after being arrested during a traffic stop.
Faustine was recently in residence at the American Academy in Rome, where she was the 2025 Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize Fellow in visual arts. Her work at the residency explored the African presence in ancient Roman society.
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