Biography

Jonas Becker was born in Morgantown, West Virginia, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She received an MFA in Studio Art with an emphasis in Visual Studies from the University of California, Irvine in 2010 and a BA in Architecture from Smith College in 2004.

Becker's video installations and photography attempt to visually represent what can't be seen, embracing this paradox. She explores how hope and belief are formed around place, especially through utopian manifestos, scientific hypothesis, religious beliefs and tall-tales. Becker uses camera and editing to embody absent subjects, intervene in perspectival space, and arrest the normative passage of time. Though her frames are notably void of human bodies, the absent subject becomes as central to the work as what is visible in the image. Thematically, Becker's work invokes tall tales from her upbringing and identification, the politicized history of the photographic apparatus, the cultural impact of our political economy.

Becker’s work has been exhibited internationally, most recently at LAXART, Durden and Ray, Monongalia Art Center, and at Lyceum Gallery in an exhibition curated by Charlotte Cotton. Becker teaches photography to both youth and university-level students, most recently at the University of California, Irvine, the HeArt Project and the Art Institute. She also founded and directs the Mobile Pinhole Project, an organization that uses a giant, mobile pinhole camera to bring interactive photography workshops to youth in neighborhoods across Los Angeles. Her recent grants and fellowships include the Center for Global Peace Studies project grant, the Medici Scholars grant, the Claire Trevor travel award and the Six Points Fellowship.