Meet the creator

Artist · US

Brian David Dennis was born in Pennsylvania in 1959 and has lived and worked in Philadelphia since 1984. He grew up in a home with movable walls designed by his father, an aspiring artist. The openness and fluidity of this modular environment captured his imagination, while his mother, a kindergarten teacher, encouraged his independent thinking and instinct to build and experiment. Dennis studied drawing and painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Initially drawn to stage design, he ultimately pursued the more personal expression offered by the fine arts. He gravitated toward collage and assemblage and, by the mid-1980s, was creating installations in which the architecture and character of the exhibition space became integral to the work. His practice encompasses mixed-media collage, installation, photography, digital montage, and self-portraiture. Working with layered and often fragile materials, Dennis explores the body as a site of memory, aspiration, vulnerability, and reclaimed agency. Architecture, distance, identity, and survival recur throughout his work, which often moves between physical reality and psychological invention. Dennis began exhibiting with the Philadelphia cooperative Vox Populi, where he remained an active member for fifteen years. He has presented solo exhibitions in Austria and at the Philadelphia Art Alliance and Sande Webster Gallery, and was selected for the Fleisher Art Memorial’s prestigious Challenge exhibition. His honors include an Independence Foundation Fellowship in the Arts. In 2016, he was commissioned to create an installation for Longwood Gardens. Dennis lives and works in Philadelphia with his husband, painter Keith Breitfeller.