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Deborah O’Grady

About this Artist

Deborah O’Grady is a fine art photographer and video artist, a frequent collaborator with orchestras, including the Saint Louis Symphony, Sydney Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the United States Navy Band, creating live video projections for symphonic performance. From 2006-2008, O’Grady traveled the Navajo Nation to create the video for the oratorio “Enemy Slayer” in collaboration with composer Mark Grey and author Laura Tohe. She continued her collaboration with Tohe in “Code Talker Stories,” oral histories and portraits of the World War II Navajo Marines. This collection of portraits is in the Albuquerque Art Museum. O’Grady’s fine art photography centers around the landscapes of the western United States. Early bodies of work represent images of the rural western landscapes that seek the mostly invisible history of the region's first people, using recorded myths and stories as her map. Recent landscape work looks beyond human impacts, to find nature's strength and resurgence, in response to the climate crisis.  

O’Grady is the founding Chairperson of the Friends of the San Francisco Jung Institute and serves on the national board of the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism. She is a frequent presenter at the Art and Psyche conference, and her photographic series “The Solider’s Dream” was featured in the San Francisco Jung Journal.