What draws me in is the space between what is shown and what lies hidden behind it, the tension between intention and representation. (…) You may set out in search of the dream, but what you will find instead is something more complex, more real — that is the space I inhabit in my photographs.
— Kourtney Roy
Kourtney Roy, born in 1981 in Northern Ontario, is a Canadian photographer and filmmaker who has been based in Paris for about twenty years. Her work lies at the intersection of photography, fiction, and performance, asserting a singular approach to staged self-portraiture.
In her images, fiction and autofiction merge: alone in front of and behind the camera, she becomes the central actor in a true inner theater, embodying multiple, often archetypal, sometimes absurd or grotesque roles, always carefully composed. Her body, artificially integrated into natural or urban settings, lends itself to an infinite number of metamorphoses, traversing a thousand and one disguised and fabricated lives.
Her photographs have received numerous awards and grants, notably the Carte Blanche PMU (2013) and the Carte Blanche Pernod Ricard (2018). In 2022, Roy was awarded the Grand Commission for Photojournalism by the BnF and, in 2023, received the “Swiss Life à 4 mains” prize in collaboration with composer Mathias Delplanque. In 2020, her book THE OTHER END OF THE RAINBOW received a special mention for artist books at the LUMA Rencontre Book Dummy Award in Arles and won the 2023 Photobook of the Year Prize from booksellers. Her first feature film, KRYPTIC, premiered at the SXSW Film and TV Festival in Austin, Texas, in 2024.
Her work is exhibited internationally and in numerous French institutions (Le Bal, Musée Nicéphore Niépce, Centre d’art La Passerelle Brest, Jeu de Paume, Rencontres d’Arles). In 2026, the exhibition Kourtney Roy, All Inclusive at the Cité de l’Économie in Paris will present selections from three of her series.