Samuel Allen

PhD Candidate

Areas of interest: History of photography; American art, nationalism, and empire; labor history; sexuality and gender.

Samuel Allen studies Northern California’s interwar photography, focusing on its relationship to nationalist politics and the invention of regional identities and histories. To foreground these entanglements, Allen’s dissertation explores the function of nature and landscape in photographs by Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Edward Weston, and their peers. This project has received support from the Amon Carter Museum of American Art and Peter E. Palmquist Memorial Fund for Historical Photographic Research.

Allen is currently a curatorial assistant in the Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Photography. As guest curator at The Soloviev Foundation Gallery, he organized the group exhibition “something you cannot hold.” (2024–2025). Previously, he participated on curatorial teams at the National Gallery of Art and Grey Art Museum.