Dani Lessnau is an artist whose artworks evolve out of her own hyper-sensitization practice, embracing her body as a medium in constant relationship. By prioritizing iterations of somatic play and pleasure-gathering in her photographic and object based work, she opens a conduit for collaboration with both the material and the immaterial, solid and unseen. Interested in complicating habits of conventional perception surrounding pleasure, healing and creatorship, Lessnau leans into spaces where what seem to be paradoxes enfold and re-shape one another. The alien and the familiar; the tender and the erotic; the specific and the abstract; the strong and the vulnerable, all translate and mutate.
Lessnau is currently based in Brooklyn, NY. She studied at the International Center of Photography, received her MFA from Bard College and is currently pursuing a Master of Science in Acupuncture and Chinese Herbal medicine, from Pacific College of Health and Science.
EXHIBITTIONS
Past
2022 A Woman’s Right to Pleasure, Sotheby’s online platform
2022 Miroslav Tichy & Dani Lessnau, Galerie Javault, Paris, France
2021 Close alternative, Thesis show, Bard Exhibition center, Redhook, New York
2019 IRL: Investigating Reality, The Untitled Space, NYC
2019 Conditions of Exchange, pop up gallery at 80 Nassau street, NYC
2018 Our Souls to Keep, Field Projects, NYC
2018 Figure Fuggenti, Acta International, Rome
2018 Divina Comedia, XXXI Festival International of Sexual Diversity at Museo Universitario del Chopo
2018 Opening Reading, collaboration with D. Graham Burnett, Cambridge, MA
2017 Notas al Futuro, Galerié Breve, Mexico City
2017 Honorable mention in the annual juried competition, Baxter Street Gallery, New York.
2017 Hidden Narratives, Rita K. Hillman Gallery, New York
PUBLICATIONS
Surveillance & Society - Volume 22, Number 1 (2024)
“The Pleasures in Being Seen”: An Interview with Dani Lessnau, Led by Drs. Stéfy McKnight and Julia Chan
Femmes Photographes
The Guardian
Le Corps photographe Focales [En ligne], 4 | 2020, mis en ligne le 01 juin 2020 by Marc Lenot
Ekphrasis Journal article by Alexandra Turcu
DAZED
Refinery 29
W Magazine
Playboy
Cultura Colectiva
Fisheye Magazine
NR Magazine
A Woman’s Right to Pleasure
Museé Magazine Issue No. 24 Identity
BUST Magazine
Rotten Magazine