danielle mourning
Danielle Nelson Mourning lives and works in ojai, CA. Mourning received her MFA from the Royal College of Art in London, England in 2005. Upon graduation, she received the Deutsche Bank Pyramid Award for Fine Art, which funded her work in Ireland and resulted in her work’s inclusion in its permanent collection. Mourning cites American conceptual artist Christopher Williams as a significant influence on her practice, whom she worked for while attending Art Center College of Design. Her exhibition history includes solo shows in Los Angeles and New York. There is an energy that resonates through Danielle Nelson Mourning’s haunting photographs that is both accidental and deliberate. “I create my work through both an intuitive and kinesthetic process,” says the artist, who first began shooting with her parents’ camera at the age of 12 when her sister was born. After assisting National Geographic photographers in Cuba and studying commercial photography at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Mourning realized her talents were better suited to the arts. Inspired by a friend in her 80s and the 1950s home she lived in, Mourning turned her camera around. “I began taking self-portraits within those rooms,” says Mourning, who now works from a studio in Potrero Hill. “I wanted to tell her story through placing myself in photographs.” Self- portraits have been a recurring theme in Mourning’s work, and recently, she is newly inspired by her own Bay Area surroundings. “The coastline is very much a part of me,” she says. “But I only now see how many photographic possibilities it holds.”