Dani F. Hughes is a photographic artist based in the Great Lakes region whose practice explores resilience through inherited knowledge and environmental change. Rooted in her upbringing in rural Michigan, Hughes is drawn to family folklore, working-class labor, and ecology as ways of understanding loss and adaptation between bodies and landscape.
Working across analog and alternative process photography, paper and bookmaking, and natural material experimentation, Hughes creates photographs and ephemera that engage both poetic and scientific perspectives. Revisiting, rephotographing, and working with site-specific materials allows her to observe and document gradual transformations that become visible only through return. Through defamiliarization, the use of visual and material metaphors blurs the distinction between observation and reflection, the domestic and the haunted.
Hughes is currently a Studio Art MFA candidate, as well as a Photography lecturer, at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
