For over 25 years, Victoria Sambunaris has structured her life around a photographic journey traversing the American landscape. Equipped with a 5x7 inch field camera, film, a video camera and research material, she crosses the country alone by car for several months per year. Her large-scale photographs document the continuing transformation of the American landscape with specific attention given to expanding political, technological and industrial interventions.

In addition to her photographs, her collected ephemera form the essential and incidental elements of the work as a photographer and researcher. This work includes video documentation of experiences and observations on the road: snapshots, maps, road logs, journals, geology and history books, mineral specimens and artifacts.

Sambunaris was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and currently lives in New York. She received a BA from Mount Vernon College and an MFA from Yale University School of Art.

Her work has been widely exhibited in museums and galleries and  can be seen in numerous collections throughout the United States, including those of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Sambunaris has received numerous awards, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2021); Charles Red Fellowship in Western American Studies, Brigham Young University (2015); Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship (2010); and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2010). Radius Books published her monographs - Taxonomy of a Landscape (2013) and Transformation of a Landscape (2024).

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