Trevor Paglen was born in 1974 in Camp Springs, Maryland, and lives and works in Berlin. In 2018 his mid-career survey exhibition Sights Unseen was held at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog. Further one-person shows have been held at the Barbican, London; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno; Secession, Vienna; Berkeley Art Museum; Kunsthall Oslo; and Kunsthalle Giessen, Germany. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, United Kingdom; Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Haus der Kunst, Munich; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. He participated in the 2009 Istanbul Biennial; 2012 Liverpool Biennial; 2013 ICP Triennial, New York; and the 11th Gwangju Biennale. He has received numerous awards, including a 2017 MacArthur Fellowship, the 2014 Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award for his contributions to counter-surveillance, and the 2016 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. His authored publications include The Last Pictures (New York: Creative Time Books; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), a critical compendium of his Creative Time project to launch an ultra-archival disc, micro-etched with one hundred photographs, into orbit around the Earth for billions of years; Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World (New York: Penguin Publishers, 2009); and I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me: Emblems from the Pentagons Black World (Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing, 2007). Phaidon published the artist's first complete monograph in 2018.
Artist's CV