Barbara Boissevain is a visual artist and photographer from Silicon Valley who explores and documents environmental and social justice issues. In her ongoing project, Big Dirty Secrets, she highlights issues of toxicity with the intent of fostering meaningful discourse about environmental stewardship.
Boissevain studied painting at Parsons School of Design in New York, and then went on to receive her B.F.A in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute and an M.F.A. in Photography at San Jose State University. In 2009, she was awarded the Best of ASMP from the American Society of Media Photographers.
Her work has been exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions in the USA and Europe. These include: Memoire De L'Avenir, Paris, France; Photographic Center Northwest, Seattle, WA; the Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose, CA; Currents 826, Santa Fe, NM; Galerie Numero Cinq, Arles, France; and the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, Poland. Her work has been published in numerous publications including Lenscratch and The American Scholar. Her work was featured on NPR and the PBS show “Something Beautiful.” She published Children of the Rainbow in 2009, a book and traveling exhibition that documents humanitarian problems due to climate change, facing Quechua communities in Peru.
Her art has been acquired by numerous public and private collections around the world, including the Google corporate collection. For the past seven years, she was an artist in residence with the City of Palo Alto’s Cubberley Artist Studio Program in Palo Alto, California. She was awarded an artist-in-residence in France at Galerie Huit in Arles in conjunction with the Les Rencontres de la Photographie Festival.