Biography

Brigitte Lustenberger, born in Zurich, studied social and photographic history at the University of Zurich, where she completed her thesis on the photographs of Robert Capa and Gerda Taro from the Spanish Civil War. In 2006, she earned her Master’s degree in Fine Art Photography and Related Media from Parsons The New School of Design in New York.
Lustenberger is an award-winning artist who exhibits her work both nationally and internationally. Her most notable accolades include the Merck Prize (2018) from the Darmstädter Fototage, the Grand Prize Winner PDNedu, the Golden Light Award, the Photography Award of the Canton of Bern (2002, 2013), the Landis&Gyr Grant (2013), the Prix Photoforum (2005), as well as the Art Grant (2018) and the Artist Book Grant (2022) from the Canton of Bern. 2025 was she awarded with the Jungck Prize for Women Artists.
Her work has been featured in numerous group and solo exhibitions worldwide, including solo shows at the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne and La Chambre in Strasbourg. Additional presentations include the Saatchi Gallery in London, the platform Fotomuseum Winterthur, Kunsthalle Bern, Photo London, Unseen Amsterdam, La Filature in Mulhouse, Paris Photo, and the Walter Keller and Christophe Guye Galleries. A major on-site installation featuring 40 large-format images was shown at the old cemetery in Monthey. Her monograph An Apparition of Memory was shortlisted for the Most Beautiful German Books. Lustenberger has also taught as a guest lecturer at the University of Basel and the Bern University of the Arts.
In her artistic practice, Brigitte Lustenberger engages deeply with the photographic medium—particularly its inherent ties to themes such as transience, memory, and the fragility of life. A central aspect of her work is a critical examination of the depiction of the female body in photography, and the related dynamics of seeing and being seen (the gaze).
Her work inhabits the intersection of craft, art, and science. Often using her own photographic processes, she fragments, deconstructs, and reassembles images in order to challenge her own gaze. The theme of impermanence and aging also manifests in the materiality of the work itself. She presents wall-based photographs alongside spatial installations. She often blends analog and digital photography—merging historical and contemporary techniques—two eras of photographic image-making converge. It is from this interplay that the essence of her practice emerges: a searching, questioning photographic gaze.