Alex Prager (b. 1979, Los Angeles, California) is an American artist, director and screenwriter based in Los Angeles. Prager is known for her uncanny images and films that blur the line between artifice and reality to explore the human condition. Prager has spent over two decades honing her signature style, which draws on traditional movie making techniques from golden-era period styles (like film noir and Technicolor), classical mythology, and the allegorical works of Dutch Renaissance painters Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brugel. Over time, large-scale productions have become synonymous with her work.
Working simultaneously across film, photography, and sculpture, Prager constructs highly emotional moments that feel like a fabricated memory or dream. Her distinctive use of archetypes, everyday objects, humor, and allegory—along with her signature technicolor facades—allow her to explore dark and complex topics. Existential concerns are central to her practice, including collective and individual identities and the impact of technology on society. Like the psychological works of artists including Alfred Hitchcock, Edward Hopper, Pipilotti Rist, August Sanders, and Bill Viola, Prager’s work invites the viewer to contemplate the human experience by revealing that the extraordinary lurks within the ordinary.
Prager’s expansive oeuvre includes 10 short films, which feature classically-influenced and often original scores. “Despair” was included in the “New Photography 2010” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and marks a career breakthrough for the artist. The Curator of Photography at MoMA, Roxana Marcoci, has described her work as "intentionally loaded," saying "it reminds me of silent movies—there is something pregnant, about to happen, a mix of desire and angst." In 2013, Prager debuted “Face in the Crowd” in her first solo museum exhibition in the United States at Washington D.C.'s Corcoran Gallery of Art. The following year, the film was selected for the New Directors/New Films festival at MoMA and Lincoln Center, New York, NY. In 2019, Prager exhibited her most autobiographical body of work to date, which consists of both photographs and the film “Play the Wind.” Her most recent short film, “Run,” premiered at the Santa Barbara Film Festival and was nominated for the 2023 SXSW Grand Jury Award. In 2023, Prager was named one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film by Filmmaker Magazine. Prager is currently developing “DreamQuil,” her debut feature film—a cautionary tale about identity, automation, and what makes us human.
Prager’s work has been featured in countless museum exhibitions globally, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; The Photographers’ Gallery, London, United Kingdom; Fotografiska, Stockholm, Sweden; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA, among many others. Prager’s work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and many other international public and private collections.
She has received numerous awards for her work, including the FOAM Paul Huf Award (2012), an Emmy award (2012) for her short film series “Touch of Evil,” (commissioned by The New York Times Magazine), the Vevey International Photography Award (2009) and the London Photographic Award (2006). Prager’s most recent public commission features a large-scale installation of her photographs on the exterior of the Hyundai Card Music Library in Seoul, South Korea (2020-2025).
Artist portrait by Jeff Vespa