artists     stories    image-search     news    contact

Blaise Cepis

location: NY & LA, USA

Cepis is an established photographer and director known for creating work that is bright, warm, playfully absurd, subtly opulent, and a touch surreal—a celebration of the exaggerated human condition and the unique traits that make people unforgettable.

After graduating from Parsons School of Design, Blaise began his career as an Art Director at leading agencies like JWT, Mother, and Sid Lee, shaping campaigns for iconic brands such as Vespa, Cadillac, Red Bull, PepsiCo, Absolut, and Smirnoff. Since stepping behind the lens, he’s seamlessly blended his commercial experience with fine art sensibilities to craft work for an impressive roster of collaborators, including Calvin Klein, Adidas, Standard Hotels, Virgin Hotels, Away Travel, Remy Martin, Velveeta, Bombas, Chevrolet, Headspace, Parade, Impossible Foods, The New Yorker, NBC, and Vice.


︎ // website

Alma Haser

location: UK

Born in 1989 into an artistic family in the Black Forest, Germany, Alma Haser is now based in South East England. She is known for her complex and meticulously constructed portraiture, which is influenced by her creativity and her background in fine art. Haser creates striking work that catches the eye and captivates the mind.

Expanding the dimensions of traditional portrait photography, she takes her photographs further by using inventive paper-folding techniques, collage and mixed media to create layers of intrigue around her subjects; manipulating her portraits into futuristic paper sculptures and blurring the distinctions between two-dimensional and three-dimensional imagery.

Haser has won many awards for her work, including Magenta Foundation's Bright Spark Award for her Cosmic Surgery series (also the basis of a successful self-published book project). Her piece The Ventriloquist won the fourth prize for the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery. Alma Haser also won the PDN Photo Annual Award for her Eureka Effect series. Her work has been exhibited worldwide.


︎ // website  

David Maisel

location: San Francisco, CA, US

David Maisel (b. 1961, New York) is an artist working in photography and video, and the recipient of a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts. Among his chief concerns are the politics and aesthetics of radically human-altered environments, and how we perceive our place in time via investigations of cultural artefacts from both past and present. His work focuses on power and the production of space by examining landscapes and objects that are off-limits, quarantined, or hidden from view.

Maisel received his BA from Princeton University, and his MFA from California College of the Arts, in addition to study at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.


︎ // website

Brigitte Diez

location: Mexico City, Mexico

Brigitte Diez is a Venezuelan photographer based in Mexico. With a degree in Communications, she specializes in portrait, fashion, and commercial photography. Brigitte's unique creative expressiveness, sensitivity, and meticulous attention to detail allow her to transform projects into stunning artistic creations. Guided by her intuitive vision and refined technique, she brings concepts to life with captivating artistry.

She has worked for the last 10 years with numerous magazines and brands in Europe, US and Latinoamérica. Some brands she has worked with are: Dior, H&M, Audible-Amazon, Coca Cola, Puma, Corona, T Mobile, iPhone, Telcel, Uber, AT&T, Converse, Nescafé, Quacker, Bohemia, Hennessy, Levis, Barefoot Wines, Coors Light, Skechers, Cotton, Pure Insurance, Ciel, Klar, NU Bank, Embecta, Moneygram, Plata Bank, Buick automotive, La Villita, Nescafé, Cultivate BSWH, Liverpool, Ilusión Perfumes, VIPS, DiDi, Neo City, Bissú, Walmart, Coppel, among others.

¨Photography is more than just work; I approach every project as an opportunity to surpass surface ideas. It is a journey of self-exploration, capturing the subtleties and complexities of humanity. Through the diverse forms of human expression, photography becomes a medium through which I explore and reveal the vast and intricate world, including my own¨.


︎ // website

Derrick Ofosu Boateng

location: Accra, Ghana


Derrick Ofosu Boateng (Accra, 1998) is an award winning fine art photographer and founder of the African Art movement ‘Hueism’.  Inspired by the wisdom of African proverbs and the richness of the continent, he creates vibrant images that veer between visual poetry and color therapy.

Boateng employs his unique chromatic language, stark silhouettes, which translate as lessons learned from proverbial storytelling to challenge negative and limited perceptions of African culture. Since the beginning of Derrick’s artistic journey, his photography and post-production have been entirely iPhone-based. Boateng’s work brims with energy, color and meaning, which are also the leading principles of Hueism.

As a teenager, Derrick Ofosu Boateng started taking pictures with his father’s phone. This is how he developed his taste of image-making and how he taught himself about digital photography and its possibilities.

In 2017, he started sharing his work on social media, which enabled him to build a platform to share his vision of Ghanaian life and represent daily experiences & lessons. Boateng’s work proposes a kaleidoscopic and colorful portrait of his country from within.

More recently his work was featured in magazines (Vogue, Bazzar, The Guardian), album covers (A beautiful revolution part 1 & 2 for Common), and even a symbol of struggle and empowerment during the war in Sudan with one of his self-portraits. If Boateng’s life could be recounted as a success story, it is first and foremost about the humility of making, the joy of sharing and positive documentation of life on the African continent.



︎

Institute Artist is redefining how stories are produced and told. Representing auteur-driven storytellers, we bring together talent across commercials, photography, fine art, and film. Founded by Matt Shonfeld and Frank Evers. Institute Artists multiplatform production expertise, and established global relationships in entertainment, fine art, and journalism make for unmatched reach and cross-pollination of creative work. Institute Artist has been a leading advocate of the power of underrepresented talent and is fully committed to bringing these authentic voices to our clients by helping them tell compelling and entertaining stories that better connect with their audiences.