Trevor Paglen
artist.
Trevor Paglen is an artist whose work spans image-making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, engineering, and numerous other disciplines. Paglen has had one-person exhibitions at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington D.C.; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Fondazione Prada, Milan; Barbican Centre, London; Vienna Secession, Vienna; and Protocinema Istanbul, and has participated in group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Tate Modern, London.
Paglen has launched an artwork into distant orbit around Earth in collaboration with Creative Time and MIT, contributed research and cinematography to the Academy Award-winning film Citizenfour (2014), and created a radioactive public sculpture for the exclusion zone in Fukushima, Japan. He is the author of several books and articles on subjects including experimental geography, artificial intelligence, state secrecy, military symbology, photography, and visuality. In 2014, he received the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award and, in 2016, he won the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. Paglen was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2017. In 2026, Paglen was named the winner of the LG Guggenheim Award. Paglen’s sixth book, How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI (2026) is published by Verso Books. Paglen holds a BA from the , an MFA from The , and a PhD in Geography from UC Berkeley.
