American artist Joni Sternbach was born in the Bronx and is a native New Yorker. She is a Visiting Artist at Cooper Union School of Art and faculty member at the International Centre of Photography and The Penumbra Foundation in New York, where she teaches wet plate collodion. Sternbach uses early photographic processes to create contemporary landscapes and environmental portraits and her work centres on man's relationship to water. Her long-term projects involve the pursuit and understanding of the Western landscape and the series Surfland, which features tintype portraits of surfers. The photographs are a unique blending of subject matter and photographic technique. Joni works with large-format cameras and the historic wet-plate collodion process that must be prepared and developed on location. The raw quality and immediacy of collodion suits my subject matter, giving it a distinctive appearance and echoing important traditions of nineteenth-century anthropological photography.


Sternbach is a native New Yorker. She has a BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts and an MA from New York University/International Center of Photography. Her work is included in many public collections, with the most recent acquisition from the National Portrait Gallery in London, The Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City and Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA. She is the recipient of several grants including the Clarence John Laughlin award and NYFA. Her new monograph, Surf Site Tin Type was published by Damiani Editore in March 2015.


Joni lives and works in New York City.