ELLE PÉREZ

In 2025, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York acquired three works by Pérez through the Photography Council and Young Collectors Council, marking the artist’s first inclusion in the museum’s collection and recognising the importance of their contributions to contemporary photography. The acquisitions sit alongside work by a generation of emerging and mid-career artists reshaping the museum’s understanding of portraiture, queer representation, and experimental image-making.

Early life and background

Elle Pérez is of Puerto Rican descent and grew up in the Bronx, New York City, where they began photographing the local punk community as a young teenager. This early immersion in DIY, queer, and alternative spaces shaped Pérez’s attention to subculture, chosen family, and the charged social environments that continue to appear in their photography. Pérez later completed a BFA in Photography at the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA at Yale School of Art, followed by time at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. They now live and work in New York, and teach as Assistant Professor of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University.

Elle Pérez Artworks

Elle Pérez’s photographs focus on intimate exchanges, bodily traces, and atmospheres of care, often depicting friends, lovers, and landscapes that hold queer and trans life. Working primarily in analogue photography, Pérez brings a heightened attention to surface, light, and texture, giving modest subjects—such as scars, sweat, foliage, or worn clothing—a sense of emotional and political weight. Their work often addresses gender nonconformity and transition without fixing identity in a single image, instead building an expanded portrait across series of photographs and installations.

Queer spaces and early series

In the 2000s and early 2010s, Pérez photographed punk and queer party scenes such as Euforia Latina in Baltimore and Bronx Underground in New York, documenting night-life spaces as fragile sites of liberation and community. These early bodies of work established their ongoing interest in how images can hold both vulnerability and resilience in marginalised environments.

‘Devotions’ and intensified portraiture

Pérez’s exhibition Devotions at Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh in 2021 centred on large-scale, closely cropped photographs that captured bodily marks, gestures, and small rituals between people. The series deepened their exploration of photography as a form of devotion, framing looking itself as an act of care and accountability between artist, subject, and viewer. Works from this period have become key references in discussions of contemporary queer portraiture.

Public works and installations

In 2019, Pérez presented from sun to sun with Public Art Fund in New York, installing photographs on bus shelters across the city and bringing images of queer intimacy into public circulation. Earlier, the exhibition Diablo at MoMA PS1 in 2018 introduced many viewers to Pérez’s layered approach to portraiture, combining close physical detail with ambiguous narrative contexts. Subsequent solo shows at 47 Canal in New York, MASS MoCA in North Adams, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles have extended this language into series that move between interiors, landscapes, and studio environments.

Select awards and accolades

• Latinx Artist Fellowship Grant, US Latinx Art Forum, 2024.
• The Rome Prize, American Academy in Rome, 2023.
• MacDowell Fellowships, 2022 and 2021.
• Civil Society Institute Fellowship, Vermont Studio Center, 2015.
• Theo Westenberger Foundation Photography Prize, 2014.
• Bronx Recognizes Its Own Grant, 2012.

Elle Pérez Exhibitions

Elle Pérez has been the subject of both solo exhibitions and group exhibitions at important institutions and galleries. Below is a selection of important exhibitions.

Select solo exhibitions

• Guabancex, 47 Canal, New York, 2023.
• Elle Pérez (solo exhibition), MASS MoCA, North Adams, 2023.
• Elle Pérez, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, 2022.
• Devotions, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, 2021.
• shaper, Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, 2021.
• from sun to sun, Public Art Fund, New York, 2019.
• Diablo, MoMA PS1, Queens, New York, 2018.

Select group exhibitions

• The Milk of Dreams, 59th Venice Biennale, Venice, 2022.
• Group exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2022.
• Group exhibition, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Winterthur, 2022.
• Group exhibition, Renaissance Society, Chicago, 2020.
• Group exhibition, Barbican Centre, London, 2020.
• Group exhibitions, Brooklyn Museum, New York, 2019.
• Group exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2019.

More Reading

Elle Pérez’s practice has been featured in leading magazines and platforms, including Art21, Aperture, and Flash Art.

Elle Pérez FAQs

Ocula | 2026