Ashley McLean
Bio: Ashley McLean is a visual artist and director based in New York City. Working across photography, film, sound, and installation, her practice examines memory, inheritance, and the emotional architecture of place. Her work engages Black diasporic identity and personal geography, often centering landscape and interior space as sites of residue and return.
McLean received her BFA in Photography and Video from the School of Visual Arts and studied in the Fine Arts program at the Universität der Künste Berlin in 2021. She received her MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University.
Her work has been exhibited domestically and internationally, including at the Arles Photo Festival and in the Dior Photography and Visual Arts Award for Young Talents group exhibition. In 2023, she received the Creator Labs Photo Fund from Aperture Foundation and Google Pixel. She was most recently featured in Cultured Magazine’s 2025 Young Photographers List.
First Year Exhibition
Ashley McLean
Ring’in, 2025
Photographs and video projection on steel sheet
Courtesy of the artist