Susan Patrice is a documentary photographer, contemplative artist, and community arts organizer. For twenty years, her photographs and public installations have focused on the southern landscape and its people and featured intimate images created in faithful collaboration with her subjects. Most recently, after a radical change in her eyesight, Susan has been exploring the wilder edges of visual perception and its impact on feelings of connection and kinship. Here, she engages in gestural conversations with the land through cameras that she designs, builds, or alters in response to place. 

While Susan’s work has been widely collected and exhibited in places such as the Appleton Museum of Art, University of North Carolina, University of Georgia, and the Beech Institute and held in private collections around the globe, her passion is for public and community art. Susan has facilitated public exhibitions and installations in places as diverse as nature trails, garbage dumps, abandoned city lots, and government buildings. As a photo educator, Susan has supported organizations with community projects that address problems as varied as food security, gender equality, racial equity, ecological personhood, and environmental and social justice.

Susan lives in Marshall, NC, and is the co-founder and co-director of the Kinship Photography Collective.