Elle Pérez

Elle Pérez (born 1989) is an American photographer whose work explores gender identity, intimacy, vulnerability, and the relationship between seeing and love. Pérez is a gender non-conforming trans artist. Pérez is represented by 47 Canal and currently lives and works in New York City.

In 2019, Pérez was featured in Cultured Magazine s "30 Under 35" and in Forbes s "30 Under 30". Pérez's work was included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial.

Early life and education Pérez is of Puerto Rican descent and grew up in the Bronx, New York City.

Pérez holds a BFA in Photography from Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA in Photography from Yale School of Art. They attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Work In 2014 and 2015 Pérez photographed queer and punk spaces such as Euforia Latina, the name for latin night at Club Hippo in Baltimore, MD and Bronx Underground, a punk show at the First Lutheran Church of Throgs Neck, in the Bronx, both of which have since closed. Pérez's photographs chronicle these spaces of queer liberation. In these nightclub photographs, "Pérez, working in settings of emotional familiarity, takes her subjects, their queerness, and their blackness and brownness for granted. By doing so, [they] recenter all LGBT individuals as normative, everyday, and utterly beautiful."

While a graduate student at Yale in 2015 they began a series titled "Raw," photographs of the Black and Latino wrestlers of the Bronx underground wrestling scene. Pérez was interested in how wrestlers create personas to experiment with new identities, and specifically identities that may not be accessible to them in everyday life. In an interview with The Fader about this series they state, "I think wrestling is important for people in my community who are denied certain types of identities and can't be anyone they want in the "real" world. You can be anyone you want in the ring."

Pérez's In Bloom solo exhibition at 47 Canal in 2018 comprised nine photographs and marked a departure from earlier images documenting queer public spaces to Pérez's own private and intimate spaces, including the apartment of their partner, Ian. They are currently an Assistant Professor of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University.

Group exhibitions

2018 – This is Not a Prop, David Zwirner Gallery, New York City 2018 – Intimacy, Yossi Milo Gallery, New York City 2018 – Everyday Muse, LTD Gallery, Los Angeles 2019 – Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City