Ilona Szwarc

Ilona Szwarc is a Polish-American artist working across photography, sculpture, and performance. Born in Warsaw, Poland, and based in Los Angeles, she stages conceptual inquiries into identity, transformation, and the doppelganger, an interest rooted in her own immigrant experience. For her portrait series she frequently casts women in Los Angeles who resemble her, photographing these doubles in elaborately constructed scenarios that draw on special effects makeup, casting, and cinematic production. Her exhibition Unsex me here (Make Room, Los Angeles, 2019), titled after a line from Shakespeare's Macbeth, was produced entirely in a Hollywood Regency-style house in Palm Springs and unfolded as a parable about sex and transformation. Earlier bodies of work include American Girls, a portrait study of girls and their look-alike dolls across the United States.

Szwarc received her MFA in Photography from Yale University (2015) and her BFA in Photography, summa cum laude, from the School of Visual Arts, New York (2013). Solo exhibitions include Mother Mould, Fahrenheit Madrid (2023); Virgin Soap, Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Los Angeles (2021); Unsex me here, Make Room, Los Angeles (2019); Some women can take their eyes out, AALA Gallery, Los Angeles (2018); You are now entering the human heart, Instytut Fotografii Fort, Warsaw (2017); and American Girls, Foley Gallery, New York (2013). Group exhibitions include POWER, Fotografiska Museum, Stockholm (2017); Engaged, Active, Aware: Women's Perspectives Now, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb (2018); and Lovely Dark, Regen Projects, Los Angeles (2015).

She is the recipient of the Richard Benson Prize for Excellence in Photography, Yale University (2015), the Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture (2014), and a World Press Photo Third Prize for Observed Portraits (2013), and was named one of PDN's 30 New and Emerging Photographers to Watch (2014). Her work is held in the collections of the Yale University Art Gallery, the Getty Research Institute, and the Center for Photography at Woodstock, among others. Her photographs and projects have been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, TIME, and Artsy.