Statement & Bio

  • I use my work to process and examine the emotional impact of specific events and experiences, transforming personal narratives into forms that invite connection and reflection. I believe one of the most compelling spaces in contemporary image-making lies at the intersection of digital techniques and hand-worked processes, where unique objects can emerge from the dialogue between technology and touch. I often employ beauty as a conceit, drawing viewers toward difficult truths and hidden realities they might otherwise overlook.

    I work across multiple media and believe that materials possess mana. Whenever possible, I choose the medium best suited to the conceptual and emotional needs of a project. While the resulting works may differ significantly in appearance, they are united by recurring concerns with memory, identity, loss, transformation, and the relationship between process and meaning. For me, process is never separate from content; it is an integral part of the work's statement and significance.

    Every warrior has a weapon. Art is mine.

  • Diana Nicholette Jeon is a Honolulu-based contemporary artist whose practice is rooted in the moments when the stories we tell ourselves no longer align with the lives we are actually living. She creates intimate, melancholic images that hover between memory and reality, dream and waking, belief and disillusionment. Jeon’s process is hybrid and materially experimental, moving between digital and analog workflows, altered photographic surfaces, collage, sculptural presentation, and hand-applied processes. Her photo-based works often treat the image as both record and object, emphasizing the tactile, unstable, and fragmentary nature inherent to her dominant themes.

    Her widely lauded series Nights as Inexorable as the Sea consists of black-and-white diptychs housed in small, open-faced tins that recall family memory boxes, using uncanny pairings to mirror the quirky, unpredictable nature of dreams and the way they surface as shards of remembered or forgotten experience. The series has been featured as a Head On Photo Festival exhibition, shown at Blue Sky Gallery (OR) and Disorder Gallery (AU), and highlighted by LensCulture and curators such as Lisa Hostetler of the George Eastman Museum.

    Jeon’s broader body of work includes Damaged, manipulated Polaroid self-portraits that use physical interventions in photographic emulsion as a metaphor for betrayal trauma and PTSD; Legally Blind, which translates her mother’s diminished vision into a language of blur and softness; and Self-Exposures, mised media layered iPhone self-portraits that probe the instability of self-image and the roles women are asked to perform. In her recent post-photographic series Life in GQPubliKKa, CAKE and Unleashed, she blends her own photographs with generative AI to create allegorical figures: CAKE examines the emotional and political fallout for American women amid shifting reproductive rights; Unleashed invokes a hybrid icon drawn from Eve, Pandora, and Medusa to reflect on the anthropogenic era and climate crisis; while Life in GQPubliKKKa explores disinformation, conspiracy theories, political identity, and the erosion of shared reality in contemporary American society.

    Her work has been exhibited in more than 200 venues worldwide, including solo exhibitions at the Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu Printmakers, the Griffin Museum of Photography, Blue Sky Gallery, and international venues such as Head On Photo Festival.

    Jeon has received recognition from LensCulture, Photolucida’s Critical Mass, the Julia Margaret Cameron Awards, and Px3, among others.

    Jeon’s work is in both public and private collections, including four works in the permanent collection of the State of Hawaii Art in Public Places program. The International Printing Museum, the Albert O. Kuhn Library Special Collections Department at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, Honolulu Printmakers, and Haverford College also hold works.

    In addition to her studio practice, Jeon writes about photography and visual culture for FRAMES Magazine and Lenscratch, and previously for OneTwelve. Through her writing, she advocates for women working in photography and lens-based media while fostering dialogue around contemporary image-making.

  • 2017 PLAYA at Summerlake, Summerlake, OR.

    Awarded a 4-week, fully funded artist residency

    2017 Double Dog Dare Studio, Kauai, HI.

    One week Photo-litho and Monoprint residency

  • 2006 MFA Imaging and Digital Arts, UMBC, Catonsville MD

    2003 BA Studio Art, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, Honolulu, HI

  • 2007 – 2013

    Lecturer, New Media Arts. Kapi'olani Community College, Honolulu, HI / Intro to Digital Art; Digital Imaging; Motion Graphics; Digital Multimedia

    Fall 2010

    Lecturer, Chaminade University, Honolulu, HI / Communications Design

    2008 – 2010

    Lecturer, Art. University of Hawai'i at Manoa, Honolulu, HI / Expanded Art (Digital Art and Theory)

    Spring 2006

    Instructor of Record, Printmaking. UMBC, Catonsville, MD / Photo-Digital Processes in Non-Toxic Printmaking

    Fall 2005

    Instructor of Record, Printmaking. UMBC, Catonsville, MD / Introduction to Non-Toxic Printmaking

    Spring 2005

    Teaching Assistant, Photography. UMBC, Catonsville, MD / Time and Sequence

    Fall 2004

    Teaching Practicum, Printmaking. University of Maryland at Baltimore County, Catonsville, MD / Introduction to Non-Toxic Printmaking

    Spring 2000

    Instructor. Kapi'olani Community College, Non-Credit Division, Honolulu, HI / Introduction to Photoshop

  • Linktree/Profile, Links, News

    MuckRack/Journalism Profile

    Artfacts/International Artist Ranking & Profile

    Artsy/Profile

    PhotoVogue/Portfolio

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