Liz Vance is an artist and writer living and working in the Washington DC Metro area. She’s studied art, literature, and anthropology, and finds the world – and the people in it – simply fascinating. She started out as a documentary photographer, and fell in love with studio work almost by accident. She’s been working as a professional studio portrait photographer since 1998, with studios in Rockland, MA, and Arlington and Falls Church, VA. To shake things up a bit, for five years she was a freelance photojournalist for the Washington Post, telling small stories about the people and places in her community. Her work has been shown in galleries and museums along the East Coast, and her most current work in progress can be found on Instagram.
Liz Vance is an artist and writer living and working in the Washington DC Metro area. She’s studied art, literature, and anthropology, and finds the world – and the people in it – simply fascinating. She started out as a documentary photographer, and fell in love with studio work almost by accident. She’s been working as a professional studio portrait photographer since 1998, with studios in Rockland, MA, and Arlington and Falls Church, VA. To shake things up a bit, for five years she was a freelance photojournalist for the Washington Post, telling small stories about the people and places in her community. Her work has been shown in galleries and museums along the East Coast, and her most current work in progress can be found on Instagram.
Liz Vance has been an artist, a journalist, and an educator. She’s been a bookstore clerk, a defense contractor, and the midnight switchboard operator in a small-town hospital. She tried, once, to be the mascot for a minor league baseball team, but was inexplicably not hired for the job. She was once offered the opportunity to write for a major online magazine, but was afraid to take the leap, and has been regretting that momentary lapse of judgment ever since.
Born in Northern Virginia, Liz has lived within 5 miles of Rt. 1 for her entire life – even during those few years in the 90s, when she lived in Boston. Because of this, she has travelled the world as much as possible, and daydreams of future trips to English gardens, Florentine museums, Parisian art galleries, and this little restaurant in Digby, Nova Scotia, where one will find the most delicious scallops on the planet. Or at least in Nova Scotia.
Despite her mother’s insistence that she learn how to type – just in case – Liz has always wanted to be an artist and a writer. As a child, to her parents’ dismay, she drew enormous chalk and pastel murals on her bedroom walls, and spent most visits to anyone, anywhere, with either a book or a sketchpad in her hands. Her high school English teacher was amused by her mandatory journal entries, which were written as Odes to… well, to many things. This clearly sent the wrong message, as Liz now has a habit of writing mediocre poems and posting them on Facebook with nary a second thought.
In college, Liz wanted to Do Something Important. Unfortunately, she had no idea what that would actually look like, so she took every photography class that the community college had to offer (and is one history class short of a degree!), took English classes whenever there was room in her schedule for an extra elective, and changed her major every other semester, eventually settling on an Anthropology degree at George Mason University. She wanted to tell stories, in words and in images, and wanted to know the world. The high school typing class turned out to be pretty handy. (Please don’t tell her mother she was right.)
The Apocryphal “How I Became A Photographer” story usually goes something like, “I picked up a camera and I never looked back,” and Liz has believed and been telling some version of it about herself for the last 30 years. But after recently going through many boxes of old photos, she realized her memories were not to be trusted. The sheer number of blurry cat pictures taken with her little Kodak 120 and 110 cameras were staggering – and they were taken a decade before she got her hands on a Nikon. So she can only conclude that she has always been a photographer. Just a really, really bad one, at least in the beginning.
Liz currently lives in Arlington with her famously patient husband, two teenagers (also hers), two cats (Zeke and Dr. Who), two fish (Cicero and Lipschitz), and two very cute rats (The white one, and the white one with the black spots). She doesn’t answer her phone when she’s puttering in the garden, or dreaming of puttering in the garden, for that matter. And before things went sideways last year, she spent an unseemly amount of time convincing friends to attend theater performances with her at the Folger Theater, her favorite place in Washington, DC., where one of the highlights of her life occurred. She and her husband sat directly in front of her hero, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for the performance of District Merchants, and she (Liz) made it through the entire night without making a fool of herself. She has a similar story about meeting her artistic idol, Joyce Tenneson, that didn’t end as well. If you ever meet her in person, feel free to ask. She’ll tell you all about it, and then deny it ever happened.