Lori Grinker

Lori Grinker (b. 1957, New York) began her career as a photographer in the early 1980s while a student at Parsons School of Design, where she studied with Berenice Abbott, George Tice, and Lisette Model. In 1981, Inside Sports published her photo-essay about a young boxer as its cover story. While working on that project, she met another young boxer, thirteen-year-old Mike Tyson, whom she documented for the next decade and whom she photographed for the cover of Sports Illustrated in 1988. Her photograph of Muhammad Ali preparing for his fight for the World Heavyweight title in 1980 was published in The New Yorker, alongside an essay by editor David Remnick, on the occasion of the boxer’s death in June 2016.

Since then, Grinker’s social-humanistic work has taken her to the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, the USSR, and Africa, and throughout the United States, and has been published in Life, The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, People, The Sunday TImes Magazine (London), Stern, Geo, Photo (France), and American Photo. Grinker has been the recipient of a World Press Photo Foundation Prize, an Open Society Institute Distribution grant, a W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund fellowship, an Ernst Hass Grant, a Santa Fe Center for Photography Project Grant, and a Hasselblad Foundation Grant, and was a 2005 Ochberg Fellow of the Dart Center of Journalism and Trauma.

Between editorial assignments, commercial work, and personal projects, Grinker lectures, teaches workshops, and is on the faculty of the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York. She is the producer and director of The Wilderness After War, a profile of former U.S. service members suffering from PTSD, which aired on PBS Newshour in 2013. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions around the world, most recently in War/Photography at the Brooklyn Museum in 2013-14, and can be found in public and private collections throughout the U.S. and Europe.

Grinker is the author of two books, The Invisible Thread: A Portrait of Jewish American Women (Jewish Publication Society, 1989), and Afterwar: Veterans from a World in Conflict (de.Mo Design Limited, 2005). Her third book, Mike Tyson, will be published by Powerhouse Books.