About
Dora Somosi is a Hungarian-American lens-based artist living and working in Brooklyn and Upstate New York. Her practice moves between alternative photographic processes and an evolving studio engagement with landscape, memory, and the histories of women. Working in cyanotype, hand-coated paper, and embroidery thread dyed from foraged plants — walnut hulls, madder root, acorn, goldenrod — she builds bodies of work rooted in deep research and site-specific pilgrimage.
Her current series, By Her Side (2022–2024), photographs the trees that stood witness to the lives of twenty-five pioneering American women — among them Emily Dickinson, Georgia O'Keeffe, Toni Morrison, Ruth Asawa, Agnes Martin, and Imogen Cunningham. The resulting cyanotypes function as photographic blueprints: evidence of presence, proximity, and time. Her monograph of the same name was published in 2025. Mending, her most recent body of work, extends this inquiry by upcycling and repairing cyanotypes with hand-sewn, plant-dyed embroidery — drawing on Hungarian women's handwork traditions and the Japanese philosophy of kintsugi to explore resilience, repair, and the transmission of creative lineage.
Somosi's work has been exhibited at Gilman Contemporary, Klompching Gallery, The Sarah Shepard Gallery, Carrie Haddad Gallery, Kraushaar1885, the International Center of Photography, Penumbra Foundation, Bolinas Museum, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, NeueHouse, BRiC Arts, and BAM Art, and shown at AIPAD and The Print Fair at Powerhouse Arts. Her photographs have been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, T Magazine, Architectural Digest, Cultured, and Taschen. Her work is held in private collections in New York and Los Angeles, including Samek Art Museum, and Trustees of the Brooklyn Museum and BRiC Arts.
She has completed residencies at Kala Arts (Berkeley, CA), Penland School of Craft (NC), Poco a Poco (Oaxaca, MX), Trillium Arts (NC).
Prior to her studio practice, Somosi served as Director of Photography at GQ/Condé Nast (2005–2014). Worked at Marie Claire, Vibe Magazine and Magnum Photos. She has received awards from ASME, SPD, American Photography, PDN, and the Art Directors Club, and an Emmy nomination for short-form video. She has lectured at the International Center of Photography, the School of Visual Arts, and MassArt, and served as Vice President of the Society of Publication Designers and Secretary of the Board of the W. Eugene Smith Fund.