Location: Berkeley, CA
Medium: Photography, Collage, Printmaking, Artist Books
Website: leahkoransky.com
Leah Koransky is an artist and graphic designer based in Berkeley, California. She earned a BA with a concentration in printmaking and painting from Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, studying abroad at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice, Italy, and completing summer study in photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She later moved west for a BFA in graphic design at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, and returned to graduate study two decades into her career, receiving an MFA from the School of Art at San Francisco State University in 2024.
Koransky worked for years as a designer and art director for clients in the arts, technology, health, publishing, and fashion, and her design work was recognized by Graphis, Communication Arts, Metropolis, the Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards, and the Davey Awards. She taught graphic design at California College of the Arts and its extension program from 2018 to 2020, lectured at UC Berkeley Extension, and served as a graduate teaching assistant in advanced photography at San Francisco State University. She is also co-founder of Deep Time Press, an independent publisher of artist books and prints concerned with time, place, and the environment.
Her recent studio practice has been supported by a series of Bay Area fellowships and residencies: a LABA East Bay Visual Arts Fellowship in 2022, artist residencies at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley in 2022 and 2025, the Leo D. Stillwell Jr. Graduate Student Scholarship and a Cadogan Contemporary Art Award in 2023, a Conveyor Studio print residency in 2025, and a 2024–2025 Graduate Fellowship at Headlands Center for the Arts in the Marin Headlands. Earlier fellowships took her to Mildred’s Lane in Narrowsburg, New York, and the SVA Artist Residency Project in 2021.
Koransky works between photography, collage, printmaking, sculpture, painting, and design, using light, color, and form to explore what she describes as the precarious relationship between place and self. Much of the work is made by exposure rather than by capture: cyanotype photograms and anthotypes printed by the sun, camera-less records of a shadow crossing a surface over the course of a day. Archival pigment prints and gelatin silver prints are frequently cut, layered, folded, or paired with found and natural objects, so that a photograph becomes a physical thing in the room rather than a window onto elsewhere.
The resulting bodies of work sit at the seam between landscape and abstraction. Series such as Every Shadow is a Clock and Fragments from an Unknowable Landscape treat the photographic surface as a timekeeping device, registering geologic and daily duration at once, while the Headlands installation to see what isn’t hard to see took the ancient chert beds of the Marin coast as a way into deep time. Her publishing work with Deep Time Press extends the same concerns into the book form, where sequence and the turning page carry the passage of time that a single print can only imply.
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