Allan deSouza

Allan deSouza (born 1958) is a photographer and multi-media artist. He currently lives and works in San Francisco, where he is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley.

Born in Nairobi, Kenya, to parents originally from Goa, India, deSouza moved to London, England when he was seven, and was educated in both the UK and the United States. A traveler and member of an increasingly cross-national, global culture since birth, deSouza engages with issues of migration, relocation, and international travel in much of his work. The inheritor of the ideas and issues of colonialism and postcolonialism, his photoworks, texts, and installations re-examine historically-fraught meanings of geography, culture, and personal and communal identity. Much of his work takes up themes and visual vocabulary of migration and diaspora; his series of photographic work, The World Series, for example, was created as a response to Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration Series. DeSouza’s interest in movement, travel and dislocation has provoked an engagement with memory and the passage of time in his work. For the photographic series The Lost Pictures, DeSouza placed a number of slides of old family photos around his house, deliberately allowing them to become scratched, faded, and covered in dust. Desouza’s work, in the words of one critic, “explores...both memory and photography as means of recording and preserving the past from aging, loss, displacement, and historical change.” Although often based in historical figures or events, his work also incorporates "fiction, erasure, re-inscription, and (mis)translation".

DeSouza's work has been featured at museums and galleries worldwide, including at The Phillips Collection, in Washington, DC, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, in San Francisco, International Center of Photography (ICP), in New York, Centre Georges Pompidou, in Paris, the Museum for African Art, in New York, Moderna Museet, in , Sweden and Talwar Gallery, which represents the artist, in New York and New Delhi.

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