Haley Sessoms is a lens-based artist and writer from Roanoke, Virginia, living and working in Brooklyn, New York. She holds a BFA in Photography with minors in Museum and Gallery Practices and Art History from Pratt Institute.

Working across photography, writing, textiles, and painting, her practice turns inward, rooted in themes of home, memory, inheritance, and the quiet ruptures within family life. Drawing from personal archives and maternal histories, Haley’s work explores the dissonance and intimacy found in biracial identity, often blurring the line between document and dream. Her images linger in ambiguity, preferring softness over answers, opacity over spectacle.

Her 2024 series, The Photographs Belong to the Family, brought together 22 photographs as an early investigation of self through the lens of familial memory. Anchored in the rituals of childhood and the landscapes of Southern domestic life, the project weaves personal images with intergenerational portraits, featuring her father and grandmother, as well as herself seen through her mother’s lens.

This body of work laid the foundation for Haley’s 2025 thesis project, which deepened this dialogue by returning directly to her mother’s vision. Using the same Holga camera her mother employed for her 2009 thesis, Haley reimagines intergenerational Blackness through a shared visual language of gesture, gaze, and the Southern landscape. Her book of the same title expands the project into a hybrid form of text, image, and collage, where her mother’s photographs, archival language, and Haley’s writing converge to question the act of seeing across generations.

She has exhibited in Pratt’s Photo Galleries as well as the School of Art’s Rubelle and Norman Schafler Gallery. Her work has appeared in Docha Magazine, Lunar Press, and Suboart Magazine, and her poem “Willow” was published in Quilted Hearts by Eber & Wein.

Haley can be reached at haley.sessoms@gmail.com or on Instagram @moriijade.