My family moved around a lot while I was growing up, but the thing that remained constant with me is my love of art. I studied under a Spencer Love Scholarship for Visual Arts at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and received a Bachelor’s degree in Studio Art. Shortly after I graduated, my father was killed in an accident. The intense work of personal grief compelled me to work with other grieving people and I pursued a Bachelor and Master’s degree in Social Work from the University of Georgia. I worked with hospice patients and families in urban and rural settings for the next 22 years. The backbone of my art is a direct outcome of that intimate work and the sacred witnessing of the human condition. It forever changed me and my work. Now I have now returned back to my first love of art and am a full time artist and photographer.

My imagery is emotionally charged and it is deeply influenced by the work of pictorialist and non-traditional photographers. I seek to bridge the viewer to quiet, internal dialogues through the use of digital manipulation and non-traditional camera lenses to create moody and painterly like images. I create in smaller scale to enhance a feeling of intimacy in my work but in the past two years, I have been incorporating my imagery in site specific, large scale installations as a way of exploring and creating intimate spaces and allowing for visual meditations. I am currently exploring the energy of objects and how their tangibility can connect us to memory and emotion. Through the use of mediums such as silk, alternative substrates, wax and paper clay, I have been creating photography transfers and one of a kind objects and book structures. 

I am currently working towards a self-published book with images and contemplations from my project Sweeping the Graves. I am also continuing to exhibit this work across the United States. This year, I began a new project called The Silent Year, which explores transition, spirituality and aging.

Dawn Surratt earned a B.A. in Studio Arts from the University of North Carolina in Greensboro and a Bachelor and Master’s Degree in Social Work from the University of Georgia. Her years of work with dying patients in hospice settings is the backbone of her imagery combining photographs with photography based book structures, installations, and objects as visual meditations exploring concepts of grief, transition, healing and spirituality.

Her work has been widely published for book covers and publications such as Time, Bloomberg Business Week, Lenscratch, SHOTS, Diffusion and The Hand. She has exhibited in galleries across the United States including The Center for Fine Art Photography, Southeast Center for Photography, A.Smith Gallery, Photoplace Gallery and the Griffin Museum of Photography. She was a 2016 and 2020 Critical Mass Finalist and her work is in collections across the United States including the Peabody Essex Museum and the Rubinstein Library at Duke University, Archive of Documentary Arts. She is a 2018 nominee for the Royal Photography Society’s 100 Heroines.

Dawn is a full time artist living in rural North Carolina and teaches multi-media process and photography object work through Maine Media Workshops and College. You can find her roaming the countryside with her camera, her husband, and their Pembroke Welsh Corgi Winston who doubles as their photography assistant.