This story is taken from the summer 2026 issue of Dazed, which is on sale internationally now. Order a copy of the magazine here.

Like many artists, Collier Schorr is less interested in treading old ground than she is in discussing new work and new ideas. She’s understandably wary of being asked the same tired questions she’s answered hundreds of times before. “The philosophy of Collier is not unfamiliar,” she says from her native New York City, where she now largely resides after spending time in Germany. I promise her we can skip any questions she’s bored by, and she agrees to “give it a whirl”.

For more than four decades now, Schorr has rigorously examined concepts of identity, representation and adolescence through an iconoclastic and ambiguous lens. While she is something of a polymath, writing and drawing as well as working with collage, video installation and, more recently, dance, she remains best known for her photography work, which often blends documentary style with fictional staging.

As an artist, her manifesto is founded on a spirit of rebelliousness, and a desire to take that rebellion to a bigger, broader audience than her own circle. From her fashion photography and celebrity portraiture to her stripped-back portraits of American youth, you’ll recognise Schorr’s work, even if you don’t know who’s behind it. Aside from her string of celebrated solo exhibitions (most recently, Problems and Other Stories at Modern Art in Paris), you can expect to encounter her images in the world’s major art institutions, campaigns for Balenciaga, Dior, Miu Miu, Saint Laurent and Versace, as well as covers for the world’s leading fashion and culture magazines (including memorable Dazed moments with Sky Ferreira and Finn Wolfhard).

Feeling the desire to dance, but resisting it her whole life (“because it brought up a lot of wistfulness about wanting to be free and not feeling free”), she finally succumbed six years ago. Since then, she’s been developing a ballet in which she herself dances, inspired by Chantal Akerman’s Je Tu Il Elle, working with dancers to interpret scenes from the film and explore its themes of sex, shame and power. Her upcoming book, Writing A Letter, presents stills from the video recordings of dance sequences (“like a flipbook!”).

Below, the artist reveals how dancing has transformed her relationship with her body, “fucking around with representation”, the perils of being queer in the US right now, and more.

“I was obsessed with fashion photography as a kid, but never thought about being a photographer. And so when I finally came to [photography], it was like, ‘How can I be reunified with what was awoken in me at an early age through images?’ And then, ‘What can I do to make it more real?’ Because for me, it was a fantasy with so much promise, but I wanted to make a picture that someone like me at 14 could see and really believe.

“Everybody’s identity is noticed or questioned or argued with now; it’s always present in discussions. People who are 20 years old now came out to a world in which they were protected and encouraged. Suddenly, it’s boomeranged back to this horrifying place. I was never in that horrifying place because I wasn’t encouraged to be myself; it wasn’t supported. There’s nothing worse, I think, than being given freedom and then having that freedom taken away. There’s been such progress, and then comes the realisation that progress is not continuous. For a Black person, America may have always been terrifying, and it still is. Everybody comes at it through their own sense of freedom and fear.

“Barbara Kruger once said, ‘You have to be inside [the system] to make a change.’ That made a huge impression on me, because to be rebellious in a rebellious space is very energising, but it doesn’t have a lot of reach. There’s always a new, bigger audience to show that rebellion to.

“To be rebellious in a rebellious space is very energising, but it doesn’t have a lot of reach. There’s always a new, bigger audience to show that rebellion to” – Collier Schorr

“I’ve been working on a ballet – an adaptation of a Chantal Akerman film [Je Tu Il Elle] for six years, starting from not really knowing what I’m doing and not knowing how to dance, but knowing that I wanted to do it. I engaged dancers to dance scenes from the film with me. I don’t have a dance company; I’ve got this troupe of collaborators who move in and out of the work. It’s recorded on video cameras and phones on tripods, no real camera person, which was the solution to not wanting somebody else to have eyes on it, and not wanting to make overly aesthetic, visual decisions. So if there’s a crop, it’s because someone’s walked out of the frame.

“I’m a person who can’t look in the mirror if someone [else] is looking. I can’t tell you why; it’s just a psychological block, but I think it made me well-suited to photography. At some point, I started to feel there was something new I could do if I was in [the work]. The art part of photography has always been connected to the nude. It’s almost like the nude is fine art because all other photography is either family pictures or adverts, and you can’t have nudes in either of those categories. I was following Chantal’s movements; she gets naked, so I did too, on my own in the studio. And I realised, ‘Oh, I can look at myself now, because I have so much distance from that figure in the dance piece.’

“In my ballet there is violence, seduction, fear, grief. And there was something about printing the stills [of the dance] and pasting them into a book that was like confessing, in the same way that I think Chantal’s film is a jump into the thrill of confessing; the thrill of unveiling yourself. As a queer person, I’ve gone through life without certain privileges. But one privilege I do have is that I can fuck around with representation, because I’m invested in changing the game.”