Getty Center Los Angeles

Since she emerged in the late 1970s as one of the first important practitioners of the "fabricated photographs" movement, Jo Ann Callis (American, born 1940) has made adventurous contributions in the areas of color photography, sculpture, painting, and digital imagery. For her, photography is another studio tool to be used, along with the sets she creates and the models she directs, to render the sensual tones and textures of fabric and food, or to animate clay figures of her own making. The persistent inventiveness of Callis's work has made her a force in Southern California art and in recent photographic practice.

Callis began her art studies in Ohio in the 1950s. After marriage and child rearing, she returned to photography in the 1970s to finish her undergraduate degree, and continued on to a graduate degree in the arts at UCLA. Her avant-garde style of fabricating photographs was soon publicly recognized, and her work was exhibited and published internationally. At the same time, she developed her own role as teacher at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts).

Throughout her career, Callis has created complex sets for her photographs. She often makes her own props, hires and directs models, and designs the lighting.