Suzanne Gainer (she/her) is a lens-based artist and educator whose work spans photography, digital montage, and design. Rooted in formal explorations of space and objects as well as feminist inquiries into the body and the natural world, Gainer’s practice engages complexity—emotional, psychological, and formal—to articulate experiences that often resist language.
Her recent body of work, Every Woman and Nobody, investigates the embodied impact of sexual trauma. Drawing on research into post-traumatic stress, including Dr. Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, Gainer creates compositions that reflect unconscious memory, dreams, and the ambiguity of lived experience. Using her own body as both subject and symbolic stand-in, she builds layered images combining natural elements—feathers, open sky, water—with domestic interiors and archival material such as medical records. The resulting work occupies a liminal space between memoir and metaphor, inviting viewers to consider the contradictions inherent in trauma: the urgency to speak and the impossibility of fully articulating, the desire to forget and the persistence of remembering.
Gainer holds an MFA in Photography with honors from Rhode Island School of Design and a BA in Communication, magna cum laude, from Saint Vincent College. She has been a Professor of Digital Media, Photography, and Design at Worcester State University since 2001 and is an active member of the New England arts community, serving on the Board of Directors of the Photographic Resource Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Her work has been exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions across the United States and internationally, including the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Fitchburg Art Museum, the Center for Contemporary Arts in Abilene TX, the SAGE Gallery in Bangkok, the Mediterranean House of Photography in Barcelona, and the Millepiani Exhibition Space in Rome. She will have a solo exhibition at the Danforth Art Museum in Framingham, Massachusetts, in 2026.
Gainer’s artistic contributions have been recognized with numerous awards, including the MetroWest Artist Award from the Danforth Art Museum, the 11th Pollux Award for Digital Photography Manipulation and Collage, and the TC Coley Award for Excellence in Photography from RISD. She is also the recipient of a Worcester State Foundation Faculty Research Award and has been named Faculty Leader in Global and Cultural Experiences by Worcester State University.
In addition to her photographic work, Gainer maintains an active design practice, producing exhibition catalogs, book covers, and visual identities for cultural institutions. She has completed residencies at Joya Arte + Ecología in Spain and at Skidmore College, experiences that have deepened her inquiry into the intersections of memory, place, and visual storytelling.
Through her practice, Gainer aims to create images that are at once intimate and expansive, using the poetics of photography to surface the layered narratives that shape how we see ourselves and each other.
