Katy Grannan

Her preference to photograph strangers began while she was still at Yale School of Art, when she placed newspaper advertisements asking for "people for portraits". In her "Dream America" series, volunteers sometimes posed nude and often chose to pose in vacant lots or rooms with low ceilings. Writing in The New Yorker Andrea Scott called the portraits "an alloy of vulnerability, bravado, and nerves," and a view of the American dream turned inside out. In other work, Grannan photographed people in their homes and focused on the way their environments—furniture or aspects of private life—illuminated people's character. This work culminated in the monograph The Model American.

Grannan is influenced by the work of photographers such as Diane Arbus and Nan Goldin. Sean O'Hagan, reviewing her 2009 London exhibition The Westerns, described her work as "never less than intriguing" with "an otherworldliness here that sets her apart from her influences."

Grannan's work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, and is in public collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 2012, Grannan's work was featured in the exhibition The Sun and Other Stars: Katy Grannan and Charlie White at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She has also recently taken a portrait of President Barack Obama for The New York Times.

Grannan was born in Arlington, Massachusetts. She earned her humanities BA from The University of Pennsylvania, premed from Harvard Medical School and her MFA in Photography from Yale University School of Art in 1999.

Katy Grannan (born 1969) is an American photographer and filmmaker. She made the feature-length film, The Nine.