Julieanne Kost
Internationally recognized photographer, digital artist, educator, and speaker.
Internationally recognized photographer, digital artist, educator, and speaker.
Blog: jkost.com/blog
Email: julieannekost@gmail.com
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Website: jkost.com
Bio
Julieanne Kost is an internationally recognized photographer, digital artist, educator, and speaker whose work explores the intersection of photography, compositing, and visual storytelling. After more than three decades at Adobe, where she served as Digital Imaging Evangelist, Kost is now expanding her artistic practice while continuing to share her knowledge and creative perspective through teaching, speaking, and online instruction.
Known for making Photoshop, Lightroom Classic, photography, and digital compositing approachable, inspiring, and fun, Kost has taught audiences around the world through live presentations and online tutorials. Through her teaching, she helps photographers and artists build technical skills while developing their own visual voice. She has created more than a thousand instructional videos and is the author of Window Seat — The Art of Digital Photography and Creative Thinking, and Passenger Seat — Creating a Photographic Project from Conception Through Execution. Her photography has been exhibited and published around the world, appearing in exhibitions, books, magazines, and online.
Kost was named one of Fast Company’s “100 Most Creative People in Business.” Her contributions to the photographic industry have been recognized with the Chuck Westfall Technical Education Award from the Lucie Foundation, the Gerhard Bakker Award from the Professional Photographers of America for outstanding service through education in the field of photography and visual communications, and the PPA International Service Award in honor of Warren Motts. She has also received the International Award for Significant Contributions to Professional Photography as an Art and a Science from the American Society of Photographers, which named her an Honorary Educational Associate. She was also inducted into the Photoshop Hall of Fame by the National Association of Photoshop Professionals.
Today, Kost’s work is driven by a desire to see differently, create fearlessly, and use both camera and computer as tools for exploration, discovery, and personal expression.
Kost holds an AA in Fine Art Photography and a BS in Psychology.
Artists Statement
In her work, Julieanne Kost combines her passion for photography, mastery of digital imaging techniques, and knowledge gained from her background in psychology to construct worlds that feel familiar yet are clearly interpretations of the physical reality that surrounds us. Although her images are highly personal representations of her dreams and individual reality, they remain abstract enough to invite interpretation based on each viewer’s own history and life experiences. Through her work, she hopes to engage viewers deeply enough to step outside the reality they know and, even for a moment, enter the visual world of her thoughts and dreams.
Over the past two decades, Kost has created libraries of individual elements, ranging from photographs of textures and landscapes to scans of found objects, encaustic paintings, and charcoal drawings. These elements are not intended to stand alone; instead, they wait to become components of a larger message. The common thread is that each element must evoke an emotional response. Whether that response is positive or negative, comforting or confrontational, is not important at the moment of creation, because she may not yet know how or where the element will ultimately be used. She draws from these libraries to construct images and communicate ideas.
Because the components are created at different times and in different locations, Kost’s work exists somewhere between the traditional photographic practice of capturing a single decisive moment and the time-compression techniques used in cinematography. She creates imaginary scenes by layering elements that are unconstrained by linear time or physical location. By selecting and combining elements that work together to form a cohesive message, she creates composite images that can be more powerful than their individual parts.
The interactive process of selecting and assembling images is one of the most challenging and thought-provoking aspects of Kost’s creative exploration. Although her finished images may appear serene and calm, the act of creating them is anything but passive. She often begins with a concept in mind without knowing exactly how the individual pieces will ultimately fit together. As an image takes on a life of its own, she allows herself to explore unexpected directions, sometimes discovering that the final work only faintly resembles what she first imagined.
From a technical standpoint, Kost sees the computer not simply as a shortcut to what is possible with a camera, but as a medium that makes entirely new forms of visual exploration possible. Yet the freedom and flexibility of the digital realm also introduce their own challenges. The paint is never dry, the exposure is never fixed, and the image is never truly final; every component can be changed, reconsidered, or approached differently. For Kost, the discipline lies in knowing when to stop—recognizing the moment when the image has said what she set out to say.