Star Montana

Star Montana (born 1987) is a Los Angeles-based photographer. Her work has been shown in museums and galleries such as the Vincent Price Art Museum, The Main Museum, ArtCenter, internationally in Brazil, Ecuador, and Mexico, and in the L.A. Metro Vermont/Beverly station from 2014 to 2016. She has also been featured in articles in Aperture and Hyperallergic.

Early life Montana grew up in the predominantly Mexican American Boyle Heights neighborhood of East Los Angeles.

Education She is a first-generation high school and college graduate. She attended East Los Angeles College but transferred and received her BFA in 2013 from the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Her art bridges what she perceives as a gap in the art world. As she told Surface in 2017, “I think a lot of art is inaccessible to regular people,” she says. “They don’t feel worthy of it. I experienced that a lot.”

Montana cites Joseph Rodriguez, who she first learned of as a teenager through a Google search of "East L.A. Photographer," as an inspiration and a mentor.