Katy Grannan (American, b.1969) is a photographer from Arlington, MA ,who contributed to the world of portrait photography. In 1991, she received a BA from the University of Philadelphia. She also studied at Yale University, where she graduated with an MFA in 1999. That same year, she won the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant, which gave her the necessary funds to continue her work. Grannan uses her images to capture the personality of her subjects.
Many of Grannan’s pieces show the subject in an everyday situation with the photographer focusing on background elements that create a story. Kathleen shows a housewife standing in her kitchen; this work was part of a series of photographs for New York Times Magazine, which also included the pieces Keli and Jeff Stackhouse. Grannan often finds her subjects through newspaper ads, which she places in smaller towns and rural communities across the country. Her pieces show the vulnerable side of her subjects, such as Keli, which highlights a young mother coming home from war. The piece led to a series of photographs on female veterans who served in Iraq. The series of photographs ran in the New York Times Magazine in 2007.
Grannan displayed her work at several notable institutions during the 1990s and 2000s, including the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, The Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art in Lake Worth, FL, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, NY, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. She is the author of Model America, which Aperture released in 2005. The Westerns, an exhibition catalog released in 2008, is sold at several galleries run by the photographer. Artforum, The New York Times, Visionaire, and The Village Voice are among the publications that have shown her work in the past. Salon 94 and the Greenberg Van Doren Gallery in New York and the San Francisco-based Fraenkel Gallery represent the artist. Grannan lives in San Francisco, where she continues to work for notable magazines and publications.