Dana Fritz
Visual Art
Lincoln, NE
"Dana Fritz uses photography and books to investigate the ways we shape, know, and represent the natural world. She holds a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA from Arizona State University.
Her honors include an Arizona Commission on the Arts Fellowship, a Nebraska Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship, a Rotary Foundation Group Study Exchange to Japan, and a Society for Photographic Education Imagemaker Award. Her work has been supported by a Puffin Foundation Artist Grant and a Colorado University Boulder Libraries Rare & Distinctive Collections Photobook Fellowship. Fritz’s work has been exhibited in over 150 venues including the Phoenix Art Museum, Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts, the Griffin Museum of Photography, and the Sheldon Museum of Art in the U.S. Recent solo exhibition venues include the Great Plains Art Museum, the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum, and the Museum of Nebraska Art. International venues include Museum Belvédère in The Netherlands, Château de Villandry in France, Centro de Iniciativas Culturales de la Universidad de Sevilla, Seville, Spain, Xi’an Jiaotong University Art Museum in China, and Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Place M, and Nihonbashi Institute of Contemporary Arts in Japan.
Her prints are held in several collections including the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Bryn Mawr College Special Collections, Pennsylvania; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona; the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art; and Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Fritz’s artist books are held in collections including Yale University’s Beinecke Library; the Museum of Fine Arts Houston’s Hirsch Library; Colorado University Boulder Libraries Rare and Distinctive Collections, New York Botanical Garden’s LuEsther T. Mertz Library, and Wellesley College’s Clapp Library.
Fritz has been awarded artist residencies at locations known for their significant cultural histories and gardens or unique landscapes including Villa Montalvo in Saratoga, California; Château de Rochefort-en-Terre in Brittany, France; Biosphere 2 in Oracle, Arizona; PLAYA in Summer Lake, Oregon; Cedar Point Biological Station in Ogallala, Nebraska; Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts in Saratoga, Wyoming; Homestead National Historical Park in Nebraska; and Tallgrass Artist Residency in the Kansas Flint Hills.
Her work has been published in numerous exhibition catalogs including IN VIVO: the nature of nature, Encounters: Photography from the Sheldon Museum of Art, Grasslands/Separating Species, Reclamation: Artist Books about the Environment, and Embodied Forest, and was featured in print magazines Harper’s, Orion, Border Crossings, Studio, and Photography Quarterly. University of New Mexico Press published her monograph, Terraria Gigantica: The World under Glass, in 2017. Her second trade book, Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape, was published by University of Nebraska Press in 2023. Fritz is currently Professor of Art in the School of Art, Art History & Design and Center for Great Plains Studies Fellow at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where she has been a member of the faculty since 1998."