About Me
Jeremy Dennis (b. 1990) is a contemporary fine art photographer, an enrolled Tribal Member of the Shinnecock Indian Nation in Southampton, New York, and the founder and lead artist of Ma’s House & BIPOC Art Studio, Inc., an artist-led nonprofit art space and residency on the Shinnecock Reservation.
His practice brings together staged photography, landscape, archival research, installation, public history, and community-based projects. Through this work, Dennis examines Indigenous identity, memory, land, and the continuing presence of Native histories on Long Island. His photographs often move between cinematic storytelling and place-based research, creating images that challenge colonial erasure while connecting contemporary Shinnecock life with ancestral stories, oral histories, and cultural sovereignty.
Dennis holds an MFA from Pennsylvania State University and a BA in Studio Art from Stony Brook University. His work has been presented in solo exhibitions including Encoded Landscapes at LabCentral, Boston; Photography of Jeremy Dennis at Vassar College; Rise – Scenes of Resistance at Garrison Art Center; On This Site at John Jermain Library; Nothing Happened Here at East Window Gallery; and Stories through MTA Arts & Design at Atlantic Ave-Barclays Center.
Recent and upcoming group exhibitions include Enduring Heart: Native American Long Island at the Long Island Museum; Just Powers: Long Island Biennial 2026 at The Heckscher Museum of Art; Regeneration: Long Island’s History of Ecological Art and Care at the Parrish Art Museum; In Light and Shadow at Obscura Gallery; In Our Hands: Native Photography, 1890 to Now at the Minneapolis Institute of Art; and Speaking With Light: Contemporary Indigenous Photography at the Denver Art Museum and Amon Carter Museum of American Art.
As a curator and organizer, Dennis has developed exhibitions including Adorned Futures: Fabric, Form, and Indigenous Resistance at the Fashion Institute of Technology; What We Carry: Memory and Migration at Bridgehampton Museum; Weaving Words, Weaving Worlds: The Power of Indigenous Language in Contemporary Art at Stony Brook University’s Zuccaire Gallery; Shinnecock Speaks; and Indigenous Sea Stories at Ma’s House.
His projects include On This Site – Native Long Island, an ongoing photography, mapping, and research project documenting culturally significant Native American sites across Long Island; Rise, a cinematic series that reframes fear of Indigenous uprising and survival; and Ma’s House, a community arts and residency project that supports Indigenous and BIPOC artists.
Dennis has been awarded residencies and fellowships from MacDowell, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Ucross Foundation, Santa Fe Art Institute, the Andy Warhol Visual Arts Program, Light Work, Yaddo, The Watermill Center, Center for Photography at Woodstock, and Vermont Studio Center. His honors include the First Peoples Fund Artist in Business Leadership Fellowship, En Foco Artist Fellowship, Museum Association of New York Rising Star Award, NYSCA Individual Artist Grant, Artist2Artist Fellowship from Art Matters Foundation, Brown University Visiting Practitioner Fellowship, Pollock-Krasner Foundation Residency Fellowship, Getty Creative Bursary, Harpo Foundation Native American Residency Fellowship, and Running Strong for American Indian Youth Dreamstarter support.
His work is held in permanent collections including the Parrish Art Museum, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Long Island Museum, Heckscher Museum of Art, Hudson River Museum, Mead Art Museum, Fairfield University Art Museum, South Street Seaport Museum, Montclair Art Museum, New York State Museum, Center for Photography at Woodstock, and Preservation Long Island.
Statement
My photography explores Indigenous identity, cultural assimilation, and the ancestral traditions of my tribe, the Shinnecock Indian Nation. I use photography to examine my own identity and the identity of my community, especially the experience of living on a sovereign Indian reservation and facing the ongoing effects of colonization.
I create cinematic images because film and popular media have long misrepresented Indigenous people. My photographs question those inherited narratives and push back against stereotypes, including the simplified and romanticized images of Native people that many Americans first encounter in movies, television, and animation. By using the visual language of cinema – staged scenes, dramatic lighting, costume, gesture, and atmosphere – I create images that invite viewers into difficult conversations about history, land, memory, and survival.
My work often looks to the past in order to better understand the present. For my ongoing project On This Site, I study archaeological and anthropological records, oral stories, newspaper archives, and local histories. The resulting landscape photographs honor more than 10,000 years of Shinnecock presence on Long Island. This research has deepened my understanding of how treaties, land theft, forced assimilation, and colonial attempts to erase Indigenous communities continue to shape our lives today.
Despite four hundred years of colonization, we remain connected to our land through our stories. Indigenous oral traditions and mythology influence my photography and give me a way to imagine the knowledge, values, and sacred places held by my ancestors. By staging these stories with contemporary models and landscapes, I continue a tradition of storytelling while asking viewers to recognize the sanctity of Indigenous land beyond its monetary or real estate value.