Bio

Dana Fritz uses photography to investigate the ways we shape and represent the natural world in cultivated and constructed landscapes. She holds a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA from Arizona State University. Fritz is currently Hixson-Lied Professor of Art in the School of Art, Art History & Design at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Her honors include an Arizona Commission on the Arts Fellowship, a Rotary Foundation Group Study Exchange to Japan, and a Society for Photographic Education Imagemaker Award. Fritz’s work has been exhibited in over 140 venues including the Phoenix Art Museum, Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts, the Griffin Museum of Photography, and the Great Plains Art Museum, and Sheldon Museum of Art in the U.S. International venues include Museum Belvédère in The Netherlands, Château de Villandry in France, Xi’an Jiaotong University Art Museum in China, and Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Place M, and Nihonbashi Institute of Contemporary Arts in Japan.

Her prints are held in collections including the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Bryn Mawr College Special Collections, Pennsylvania; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona; the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art; and Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Fritz’s artist books are held in collections including Yale University’s Beinecke Library; the Museum of Fine Arts Houston’s Hirsch Library; Rare and Distinctive Collections at Colorado University Boulder; and Wellesley College’s Clapp Library.

Fritz has been awarded artist residencies at locations known for their significant cultural histories and gardens or unique landscapes: Villa Montalvo in California; Château de Rochefort-en-Terre in France; Biosphere 2 in Arizona; PLAYA in Oregon; Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts in Wyoming; Huron Mountain Wildlife Foundation in Michigan; and Homestead National Historical Park in Nebraska.

Her work has been published in numerous exhibition catalogs including IN VIVO: the nature of nature, Encounters: Photography from the Sheldon Museum of Art, Grasslands/Separating Species, and Reclamation: Artist Books about the Environment, and was featured in print magazines Harper’s, Orion, Border Crossings, Studio, and Photography Quarterly. University of New Mexico Press published her monograph, Terraria Gigantica: The World under Glass, in 2017. University of Nebraska Press published Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape in 2023.