Sam Penn


Sam Penn is an American photographer and a visual artist based in New York City. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in New York, such as New York Life Gallery and OCDChinatown, and in Paris at Balice Hertling. Penn is represented by Cadence Image and currently serves as the tour photographer and documentarian for Lorde during her 2025 world tour. Her work has appeared in Cultured, Document Journal, Artforum, among others.

Early life and education

Penn was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in 1998, and grew up in Philadelphia, PA. At a young age she started photographing her younger siblings on disposable Kodak cameras and grew from there.

Career

Penn first gained attention through Some Girls, a limited edition photobook from Ethan James Green's New York Life Gallery capturing close friends and lovers in moments of repose, tenderness, and explicit confrontation. The book was released alongside her inclusion in a group show, titled It's Personal with artists Ser Serpas and Nash Glynn.
Her debut solo exhibition, Bad Behavior, named after the Mary Gaitskill novel, opened at Galerie Balice Hertling in Paris in 2024, presenting large-format prints that collapse distinctions between landscape, body, and psychological space. Photographs from this show included locations like the Lower East Side, Fire Island, and upstate New York.
Penn's work has been show in exhibitions at James Fuentes, OCDChinatown, and New York Life Gallery. Of Penn, the art critic and American songwriter, Johanna Fateman, wrote in The New Yorker, "A row of photographs by Sam Penn offers a window onto a glam coterie in the tradition of Nan Goldin."
In 2025 she was profiled by Dazed, Cultured, and Another Magazine.
Penn joined Lorde's U.S. and European tour as the official photographer for the Virgin album cycle.
In November of 2025, New York magazine included Penn's first solo New York City show, Max, at New York Life Gallery on their Approval Matrix in their highbrow meets brilliant category. The series of large-scale photographs documented her relationship with writer Max Battle, accompanied by a book of the images along with his text. The project explores intimacy, collaboration, and intertwined authorship as the two traverse New York City, Fire Island, Paris, and Basel flying, hiking, eating, shaving, or lying in bed The show blurs boundaries between artist and subject while examining power dynamics in representation and the ethical complexity of portraiture.

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions
  • Bad Behaviour, Galerie Balice Hertling, Paris
Selected group exhibitions
  • New York Life Gallery, New York
  • OCD Chinatown, New York
  • James Fuentes, New York

    Publications

  • Some Girls
  • ''Bad Behavior''