Jennifer Sakai is a Washington, D.C. based fine art photographer, independent museum curator, and faculty member in the MFA program at American University. Her large-scale photographs explore the metaphysical and emotional connections between humans and the natural world, approaching landscape as a site of memory, presence, and absence.
In 2026, her ongoing photobook project When We Return Home was shortlisted for the LUMA Rencontres d’Arles Dummy Book Award. The project was also shortlisted for the Athens Photo Festival Dummy Award and exhibited at the Benaki Museum in Athens, Greece, from June to July 2026. Sakai is the recipient of the 2024 Prix Virginia, a biennial international photography prize for women, and the 2024 Aperture Creator Prize. Her work has been supported by a residency at the Vermont Studio Center and featured in M Le Monde (Le Portfolio, February 2025, No. 698).
Sakai is featured in the inaugural issue of The Photographer, which debuted at Paris Photo in November 2025.
She curated and designed The Road, the first monograph by musician Brian Baker, guitarist for Minor Threat, Bad Religion, and Dag Nasty. Published by Akashic Books in November 2025, the book features photographs made over more than twenty years of touring.
She is President of the Board of Directors at Transformer, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit contemporary arts organization supporting emerging artists. She has served on committees for the IMF/World Bank Photographic Society and as a juror for ExposedDC and the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts. She has presented curatorial and professional lectures at museums, galleries, arts institutions, and cultural organizations.
As a museum curator, her exhibitions include The Gifts of Tony Podesta (2019), Border Wall (2021), and Vertiginous Matter (2022) at the Katzen Arts Center at American University, the latter recognized as one of the top museum exhibitions of 2022 by Washington City Paper.
In July 2026, she was in conversation with artist Siri Kaur about Kaur's monograph Sistermoon at Rizzoli in New York City.
Sakai will be included in the 2027 group exhibition Common Things: Art and Objects in Public Life at the Katzen Museum in Washington, D.C., presented in partnership with the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College and curated by Sarah Rogers Morris, PhD.
Her work has been published in Aperture, The Guardian, Le Monde, Vogue, LensCulture, The Washington Post, and W Magazine, among others, and in publications including Musée Magazine, Float Magazine, F-Stop Magazine, BmoreArt, Washington City Paper, Color Tag Magazine, and FOTO FILMIC.
Her most recent solo exhibition was presented at Addison Ripley Fine Art in summer 2025.
Sakai is a professor in the MFA program at American University, where she teaches second-year thesis and research practicum across all artistic mediums.
She has presented artist talks at institutions including the Katzen Arts Center, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Addison Ripley Fine Art, the Washington Studio School, Photoworks at Glen Echo Park, Western Washington University, Transformer, and Gallery 31 at George Washington University.
Her work has been exhibited internationally at Somerset House, London; the Corcoran Museum; the Anderson Gallery in Richmond; IA&A at Hillyer; Addison Ripley Fine Art; the Melina Cultural Centre, Athens, Greece; the Griffin Museum of Photography; the Agecroft Hall & Gardens; the Rubenstein Arts Center at Duke University; Photoworks at Glen Echo Park; the Handwerker Gallery at Ithaca College; the Luther W. Brady Art Gallery and George Washington University. She was also a selected artist for the International Bonfire Air Artist Residency in Iceland. Her work is included in Women Artists of the DMV: A Survey Exhibition (November 2025–January 2026), the first large-scale exhibition dedicated to active women artists in the region.
Jennifer Sakai is a six-time recipient of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Fellowship Grant for her photographic practice. She was a 2023 winner of the LensCulture Fine Art Photography Awards and exhibited at Photo London. Her work is held in the collections of Williams & Connolly and the Corcoran Gallery of Art collection, as well as in private collections.
Jennifer Sakai received her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, where she studied chromogenic printing with George Nan. She holds a BFA in fine art from the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University.
She has taught at Ithaca College and Virginia Commonwealth University and was Assistant Professor of fourth-year fine art photography thesis at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design until its closure.
Her artistic practice examines landscape as a reflection of interior experience, where moments separated by time overlap and reassemble into new narratives. Her images consider how the spaces we inhabit continue to resonate long after we leave them, and how memory shapes our relationship to place. Through this work, she examines the shifting boundary between lived experience and remembered space.
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