Where do I go to learn how to use a camera ? For me, that was where I came from.
— Diana Markosian
Diana Markosian is a Russian-American photographer of Armenian origin whose work explores memory, identity, and place through an interdisciplinary process combining photography, video, drawing, and ephemeral materials. Her practice moves between documentary and poetic storytelling, articulating personal experience and collective narratives.
Her photographs have been published in international publications including National Geographic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. She has received numerous awards, including a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts (2019), the World Press Photo Award (2019), the Magnum Foundation Fund Grant (2019), the Elliott Erwitt Foundation Grant (2018), the Chris Hondros Fund Award (2015), the Firecracker Grant (2014), and the Burn Magazine Emerging Photographer Fund (2013). Diana Markosian holds a Master of Science degree from Columbia University in New York.
Her first monograph, Santa Barbara, was published by Aperture in 2020. The exhibition of the project was presented at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2020), the International Center of Photography, New York (2021), FOMU in Antwerp (2022), and Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire in Paris (2022). The project was also shown at Fotografiska Stockholm in 2023.
In 2024, she published Father (Atelier EXB), an intimate investigation into absence, lineage, and the reconstruction of familial bonds. The project was presented as a touring exhibition, notably at the National Portrait Gallery in London (2024–2025), FOAM in Amsterdam (2025), and Les Rencontres d’Arles (2025), where it received the Madame Figaro Photography Award Arles 2025.
Across her body of work, Diana Markosian develops a sensitive reflection on memory and transmission, in which personal history becomes a space for universal projection.