Trevor Paglen is a conceptual artist, writer, and geographer who uses lens-based technologies and public records to explore places, objects, and structures that are typically hidden from view. Concerned with military and corporate power and the phenomena of mass surveillance and data collection, Paglen is best known for the process of “limit telephotography,” in which high-power telescopes in conjunction with cameras are used to photograph deliberately remote places such as military bases, satellites, and prisons. More recently, Paglen has been preoccupied with inhuman modes of seeing, collaborating with researchers in a variety of fields to understand what machines see and how their way of seeing, which is integral to myriad technologies both banal and important, changes the very nature of perception in the twenty-first century.

Paglen holds a BA from U.C. Berkeley, an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, and a PhD in Geography from U.C. Berkeley. Paglen has had one-person exhibitions at Vienna Secession, Eli & Edythe Broad Art Museum, Van Abbe Museum, Frankfurter Kunstverein, and Protocinema Istanbul, and has participated in group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, and numerous other venues. He has launched an artwork into distant orbit around Earth in collaboration with Creative Time and MIT, contributed research and cinematography to the Academy Award-winning film Citizenfour, and created a radioactive public sculpture for the exclusion zone in Fukushima, Japan.

He is the author of five books and numerous articles on subjects including experimental geography, state secrecy, military symbology, photography, and visuality. Paglen’s work has been profiled in the New York Times, Vice Magazine, the New Yorker, and Artforum. In 2014, he received the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award for his work as a “groundbreaking investigative artist.” In 2016, he won the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize and, in 2016,  he also won The Cultural Award from the German Society for Photography. In 2017, he was a recipient of the MacArthur Genius Grant.