Join Shoair Mavlian, Director, Photoworks in conversation with Diana Markosian, discussing the artist’s upcoming first monograph Santa Barbara.  In partnership with Aperture Foundation.

Joining instructions for how to join this talk on 21 October will be announced closer to the event. Please check back or keep an eye on our social media channel.

Please note these events will be recorded for our archive. So if you wish to remain anonymous please turn your camera off.

Santa Barbara is the debut monograph by Diana Markosian, a talented artist who works at the intersection of photography and film. Intertwining the notion of the American dream, the romance of captivating 1990s soap operas, and her own personal history, the book is a compelling reconstruction of Markosian’s family’s first years in the United States after leaving Russia in the 1990s. The book features more than one hundred images, including staged scenes, film stills, and family pictures, in which the photographer reenacts the story of how her mother, Svetlana, became a mail-order bride in 1996, moving to the US with her two young children. Markosian follows this journey, from the disillusionment of post-Soviet Moscow to her own upbringing in Santa Barbara, California.

A solo exhibition of the same name will open at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in February 2021.

Diana Markosian (born in Moscow, 1989) holds an MS from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Her photographs have been published in National Geographic, New Yorker, and New York Times. Her most recent awards include a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (2019) and a World Press Photo award (2019). Her work is represented by Galerie Les filles du calvaire, Paris.