Biography
Curriculum Vitae- MFA, Visual Arts, Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University
- MA, Visual Communication, Ohio University
- BA, University of Memphis
Aaron Turner is an artist, educator, and curator born and raised in the Arkansas Delta. He uses photography as a transformative process to understand the ideas of home and resilience; he also uses the 4x5 view camera to create still-life studies on identity, history, blackness as material, abstraction, and the Archive.
In his most recent publication The Archive as Liberation (Light Work, 2025), he brings together a dynamic group of artists and writers to engage in dialogue around archival photographic methods. His other publications include Black Alchemy: if this one thing is true (TIS, 2020), There May Still Be Time Left (VSW, 2022), and Moves Form the Archive (Sleeper Studio, 2023). He founded the Center for Art as Lived Experience in 2022, and organized the following exhibitions and symposiums: And Let It Remain So: Women of the African Diaspora (Phoenix Art Museum, 2022), Time & Empathy: Arkansas Photographer Geleve Grice (University of Arkansas, 2021–22), and Resounding Sovereign Expressions: Resurgent Indigenuity in Ozark Arts Practice & Scholarship (co-curator, University of Arkansas, 2025).
Aaron received his M.A. from Ohio University and an M.F.A from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. He was a 2018 Light Work Artists-in-Residence at Syracuse University, 2019 EnFoco Photography Fellow, a 2020 Visual Studies Workshop Project Space Artists-in-Residence, a 2020 Artist 360 Mid-America Arts Alliance Grant Recipient, the 2021 Houston Center for Photography Fellowship Recipient, a 2021 Creators Lab Photo Fund recipient from Google’s Creator Labs & the Aperture Foundation, 2022 Darryl Chappell Foundation photographer-in-residence at Ogden Museum of Southern Art, 2023 Individual Artist Fellowship form the Arkansas Arts Council, and a 2024 Penumbra Workspace artist-in-residence.
