Michael Dweck - Mermaid 4

Michael Dweck is an American contemporary photographer, filmmaker and visual artist. Dweck’s narrative photography explores on-going struggles between identity and adaptation in endangered societal enclaves.

He has a profound sense of place and community, and his work is thus usually situated in a vivid geographic and social context. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions around the world, and is part of important international art collections.

Notable series of works include The End: Montauk, N.Y., 2004, an idyllic and sensual portrait of the famed fishing community, offering an idealized glimpse into the lives of the beautiful denizens who comprised its surfing subculture. It told a paradisiacal narrative about summer and youth, which blended idealism and documentation to reflect a place and a way of life both fading and being reinvented.

Michael Dweck: Mermaids, 2009, an impressionistic underwater dreamscape populated by storied “river children” in rural Florida; and Habana Libre, 2010; a prophetic narrative that contrasted the privileged lifestyles of Cuba’s creative class with the crumbling backdrop of a so-called “classless” society, which made him the first living American artist to have a solo museum exhibition in Cuba. His latest project, Blunderbust, explores all angles of a small-stakes stock car racetrack via a wildly ambitious and impressive mélange of sculpture, installation, abstract painting, photography and contextual film.Dweck studied Fine Arts at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, and began his career in advertising where he went on to become a highly regarded Creative Director receiving over 40 international awards, including the coveted Gold Lion at the Cannes International Festival in France.

Two of his long-form television pieces are part of the permanent film collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Michael Dweck currently lives in New York City and Montauk, N.Y., where he is finishing his first feature-length film.