Murff, Zora

American, b.1987; Des Moines, IA

BiographyZora J Murff is an educator and mixed media artist who creates images that reject neutrality, directly interrogating the pathology of white supremacy as it relates to Black cultural identity, narrative power, and systemic violence. He often integrates archival images and found footage into his projects, creating a direct conversation between history and the present. Murff is especially interested in the portrait and its impact on stereotypes and representation. His empathetic portrayal of the individual is driven by a refusal to accept how things have been visually chronicled and categorized throughout history. “By interweaving past and present, body and the landscape, my aim is to investigate how institutional and racial violence manifests and persists, and what role photography has played throughout,” he told LensCulture in 2019.

Zora J Murff’s work was featured in the Museum of Contemporary Photography exhibition American Epidemic: Guns in the United States (2021-22), which explored the implications of gun ownership in the United States through historical, intersectional, and compassionate lenses. Inspired by the shooting of Laquan McDonald by police officer Jason Van Dyke in Chicago in 2014, Murff’s series At No Point in Between (2019) addresses the convergence of the physical and social landscape to expose how cycles of oppressive systems have led to severe inequity and injustice for Black Americans. At No Point in Between was also shown at the 2021 Rencontres d'Arles in Arles, France.

Zora J Murff received his BS in psychology from Iowa State University (2010). He worked as a social worker at a juvenile detention center in Cedar Rapids, IA while pursuing his BA in photography from University of Iowa (2015). His final-year BA project, Corrections (2015), was an exploration of the impact of surveillance and incarceration on youth and would become his first photographic book publication. Murff completed his MFA in studio art at University of Nebraska—Lincoln in 2018. He was awarded Aperture Magazine’s Next Step Award in 2020, which resulted in his fourth major publication True Colors (or, Affirmations in a Crisis) (2022) and in 2023, he won the Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography. Murff has taught photography at the School of Art at University of Arkansas and School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. His work has been exhibited by Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Denver Art Museum, Museum of Modern Art, New York; and many others.