Anna Friemoth is an artist born and based in Brooklyn, New York who uses photography to project fantastical universes from ordinary materials and situations. Her work involves a mix of social engagement, private and public performance, and technological experimentation. Working entirely in-camera, she uses light filters, gels, dyes, screens and layered images to create surreal compositions that become portals to alternate realities.

Her portraits—often self-portraits—function as both subject and pigment, dissolving familiar forms into uncanny, cosmic abstractions. Bodies and faces likewise become canvases for expressions of pure color, light, shape, and form.

Friemoth’s first entryway to photography was in front of her mother’s lens—as a baby, she appeared on the cover of Time Magazine and Newsweek via Penny Gentieu’s studio work. Over time, she began to explore her own vision both behind and in front of the camera, treating herself and the world around her as compositional material.

She is exhibiting alongside her mother, Penny Gentieu, and their ancestor, Pierre Gentieu, in The Beyond, curated by Robin Riskin. Debuting in exhibitions in Ghana and Nigeria in fall 2025, the project traces a “gravitational pull that runs through all of their picture planes,” from Pierre’s luminous 19th-century realism, to Penny’s grounded contemporary work, to Anna’s surreal universes. In Riskin’s words, The Beyond is “an intergenerational journey through photography … a spiritual story, a transatlantic story, and a window into ancestry and alternate realities.”

Friemoth’s individual work has been published internationally in BLINK Magazine, Beautiful/Decay, Feature Shoot, MATTE Magazine, Hyperallergic, Time, The New York Times, Huffington Post, Slate, and Vice. She has exhibited in New York, Venice, Lagos, Ohio, and Tamale. Her series Insight was presented at Palazzo Mora in the context of the 57th Venice Biennale, and her socially engaged project Words for Women has received wide recognition.

She holds a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and Central Saint Martins in London.