About the Artist

Nancy A. Scherl is a fine art portrait photographer based in New York City. Stylistically, Nancy emulates cinema verité, often posing her subjects, offering subtle direction, and asking them to “act out” what they experience when they’re experiencing a specific circumstance, in a specific setting. The setting is frequently enhanced with formal lighting to create a specific ambience. Her portraits often invoke metaphor and social commentary. *(Nancy also blurs the boundaries between pictorial, social documentary and street genres in much of her work. She distinguishes between her staged portrait series and her visual stories –the former being cinema verite’ applying social commentary; the latter being social documentary.)

She draws from Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment.” Her camerawork may include a predetermined background and sometimes controlled lighting, but she will capture her subjects more spontaneously, once they appear within her camera frame. Nancy refers to her reality-based narratives as being staged or partially staged realities. Another aspect of her work includes fictionalized portraiture, which she refers to as her staged fantasies. As a provocateur, she lures viewers into her scientifically impossible visual worlds, designed to intrigue viewers into considering anew their formerly trusted points of view and aspects of the human condition. (Example: Macrocosmic Exaggerations gallery.)

Nancy completed an MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media at New York City’s School of Visual Arts, following her undergraduate studies in documentary and fine art photography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a Life Member of the American Society of Media Photographers, where she served as a board member from 2016 to 2019. Nancy served as board member of the Katonah Museum Artist’s Association in Katonah, NY (2017-2024) as President emerita, (2020-2022), as well as Treasurer, Archivist and Co-Chair of Programs. She founded, produced and moderated SHOP-TALK, a round table discussion series about art, produced for the KMAA.

Scherl has exhibited globally including at FotoNostrum Mediterranean House of Photography, PX3 Espace Beaurepaire, A Smith Gallery, Praxis Gallery, Photoplace Gallery, South X Southeast, Southeast Center for Photography, The Katonah Museum of Art, The Hammond Museum and the Griffin Museum of Photography. She is a two time finalist of Photolucida Critical Mass Top 200 (2019, 2023) and is the recipient of many other awards such as: Arthur Griffin Legacy Award, International Color Awards, The Tokyo International Foto Awards, Budapest International Foto Awards, PX3 Prix de la Photographie Paris, International Photography Awards, and was an Overall Winner of the Julia Margaret Cameron –The World Wide Photography Gala Awards where she had a solo show in Barcelona.