Mary Defer
Photographer

Mary Defer (she/her/hers) is a visual artist living and working in Cleveland. She grew up drawing and painting on a family farm and discovered her love of photography at Kenyon College, where she earned a B.A. in Studio Art. Her practice often revolves around themes such as the fragility of memory and the processing of loss. She uses unpredictable tools and alternative photography modes to explore these subjects.

Mary works as Administrative Associate at the Mastery School of Hawken (a project- and problem-based, gradeless high school in University Circle), where she advises the photography club and leads a weekly course focusing on analog photography techniques. She also teaches workshops at the Cleveland Print Room and serves as a mentor through their Factory Fellowship program.

Her work has been exhibited both regionally and nationally through organizations such as Summit Artspace, BAYarts, Soho Photo Gallery, and the Filter Photo Festival. A book of her photography was included in DIY: Photographers & Books, the first-ever museum exhibition of print-on-demand photobooks at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2012. In 2021, her pinhole photographs were installed in a mural on Broadway Avenue in the Slavic Village neighborhood and she was chosen as an inaugural recipient of the Cleveland Print Room Invitational Artist Residency.

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