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Urness was born in Washington, adopted at the age of four and raised by her great-great uncle and aunt. Her guardians fostered her education in tribal arts and history with the Alaskan Native Cultural Heritage Association in Seattle from kindergarten through high school graduation, ensuring that her Indigenous education was an integral part of her upbringing. While her non-native schoolmates had soccer practices on school nights and games on the weekends, she and her twin sister gathered with other Tlingit youth and elders to don their traditional regalia, learn, practice and share their traditional songs and dances. With her tribe, she traveled the state of Washington, the United States, and even overseas to Europe performing and sharing their stories with the world as a cultural ambassador. The experience left a lasting impression that would later become the foundation of her photographic work.
At the tender age of seven, Urness received her first camera from her grandmother. "The camera allowed me to relate to people," she says. "Subjects were endless and I explored them through the lens." More than just a fleeting hobby, photography became her passion and professional pursuit. She attended college and earned art degrees from Skagit Valley College in Mount Vernon, Washington and the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, California. After college graduation in 2008, she initially thought she would become a magazine photographer and began freelancing in Santa Barbara and Seattle shooting for Outside and Trend magazines, but an “aha” moment took her in another direction.
Somewhere in her early career, she began studying the work of Edward S. Curtis, a world renowned documentary photographer of European descent whose mission was to document Indigenous peoples as a ‘vanishing race.’ His black and white and sepia toned portraits of Native subjects in their traditional regalia comprise some of the earliest and most revered photographic records of Native Americans in existence. In viewing Curtis’ images, something clicked for Urness. Rather than seeing the works as relics of the past, she saw herself and her own tribal members in those images. She felt an instant calling to pick up her camera and be the one behind the lens, a modern Indigenous woman, capturing and telling the visual narrative of Native peoples and cultures not vanishing, but very much alive today. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:8C3:8100:49A0:F451:1BFB:71E1:DA12 (talk) 21:44, 24 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
