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Jennifer Karady
Jennifer Karady is an American artist and photographer best known for her series In Country: Soldiers' Stories from Iraq and Afghanistan, in which she uses staged narrative portraiture to depict the challenges for U.S. veterans returning from the war zone to civilian life. She lives and works in New York City.

Early Life
Karady was born in 1967 in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Karady’s mother was born in Estonia and her father in Hungary. Karady graduated from Brown University, where she completed a degree in semiotics. In 1998, she earned a Masters of Fine Arts in photography from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.

Process
Karady has been working in staged narrative portraiture for more than 20 years. Her single-frame photographs, carefully choreographed, contain no digital manipulation, and the subjects are real people rather than actors After conducting extensive interviews with each subject, Karady constructs the photograph from sketches; she then scouts locations and props to create a photograph as cinematic production, with hyper-real lighting Her work often contains elements of narrative tableau painting, oral history, and documentary story-seeking. The resulting photograph is four feet square.

Career
Karady’s first series, Animal Project, explored an array of deep associations between people and animals. Animal Project led to her first show in 2005, at Momenta Art in Brooklyn. The next year, 2006, Karady embarked on a new series, In Country: Soldiers Stories from Iraq and Afghanistan. The series has produced 21 photographs to date, as well as numerous exhibitions and commissions. With Soldiers' Stories, Karady spends months with her veteran-subject, discussing their experience of war and collaborating on a photograph that both depicts their individual story and reveal the challenges in returning to civilian life. Each photograph re-stages a memory from war in the soldier’s everyday environment, often including his/her family members and friends. The result is “a kind of storytelling about the private experience of wartime that has little to do with the overall thrust of the war itself; rather, they are staged scenes in which everyone involved is conscious of the simulacrum.”

In 2010, Karady received her first public commissions to make photographs with veterans along with a solo exhibition from SF Camerawork. Recent exhibitions of Soldiers' Stories include The Palm Springs Art Museum (2015), the University of Michigan's Institute for the Humanities (2014) , and the Berman Museum at Ursinus College (2013).

On Veterans Day in 2014, "Soldiers' Stories" was featured in a segment on the PBS Newshour. The work has also been profiled by National Public Radio, The New York Times , and the Los Angeles Times.

Solo exhibitions

 * Animal Project, Momenta Art, Brooklyn (2005)
 * In Country: Soldiers Stories from Iraq and Afghanistan:
 * •	SF Camerawork, San Francisco (2010)
 * •	Myhren Gallery, University of Denver (2011)
 * •	Cepa Gallery, Buffalo (2011
 * •	Berman Museum of Arts, Ursinus College, Collegeville, Pa (2013)
 * •	Slusser Gallery, Penny Stamps School of Art and Design, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI (2014)
 * •	Institute for the Humanities Gallery, University of Michigan (2014)
 * •	Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA (2014)

Select group exhibitions

 * Surface Tension, Art in General, New York (1999)
 * Unconscious Documentaries, Von Lintel & Nusser, New York (2000)
 * Dreaming, Rosenberg and Kaufman Fine Art, New York (2001)
 * Staged/Unstaged, Riva Gallery, New York (2002)
 * Petropolis: A Social History of Urban Animal Companions, The New York History Society, New York (2003)
 * Out of Rubble, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio (2012)
 * Looking Out and Looking In: A Selection of Contemporary Photography, Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo (2013)
 * Aftermath: The Fallout of War—America and the Middle East, Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, Gainesville, FL (2016)

Public Collections

 * San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SF MOMA), San Francisco
 * The Albright Knox Museum of Art, Buffalo