Brooks Dierdorff (b. 1985 Redlands, CA) is an artist exploring the ideological structures that determine how ecological collapse is visualized, understood, and narrated. He works in photography’s expanded field, utilizing research and image-based strategies to explore dynamics of extractive capitalism, the environmental legacies of colonialism, environmental utopianism, and the tensions between nature and its representation. He employs mulitple modes of knowledge production, drawing from biology, environmental history, critical theory, and archival practices to create installations, videos, images, and sculptures that make visible the complexity of ecological systems collapse. His most recent work, for which he received a Fulbright Research Award in 2023, explores the first large-scale reforestation effort in the Americas as told through the environmental history of the Tijuca Forest in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
He has exhibited his work nationally and internationally at galleries that include Amos Eno in Brooklyn, New York; The Los Angeles Center for Digital Art; The Photographic Center Northwest in Seattle; High Desert Test Sites in Joshua Tree, California; The Florida Prize in Contemporary Art at the Orlando Museum of Art; Johalla Projects in Chicago; the Ulrike Hamm Gallery in Bissendorf, Germany; the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art in South Korea; and The New Gallery in Calgary, Canada.
His work has been written about in The New Yorker, The Daily Mail, Lensscratch, Feature Shoot, Aint-Bad, and the Orlando Sentinel among others. His work has been collected by the Nevada Museum of Art and the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art.
Brooks received his BA from the University of California, San Diego in 2007 and his MFA from the University of Oregon in 2012. Currently he is an Associate Professor of Photography at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Florida.