Biography

Devin Allen (born 1988, Baltimore, Maryland) is an award-winning, self-taught photographer and artist. He gained international acclaim in May 2015 when one of his photographs of the Baltimore Uprising was published on the cover of TIME magazine, making him the third amateur photographer to have his work featured in the publication. Since then, his work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art, The Peale, the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African-American History & Culture in Baltimore, and the Gordon Parks Foundation in New York, among others, and is in the collections of National Museum of African American History & Culture in Washington, D.C., the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and The Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art in Auburn, Alabama. Allen’s photographs have also been featured in New York magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Aperture, and on a second TIME cover in 2020. His accolades include the first Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship in 2017, an NAACP Image Award nomination for his book, A Beautiful Ghetto (Haymarket Books, September 2017), and the Gordon Parks Foundation/Steidl Book Prize in 2023.

Allen is also the founder of Through Their Eyes, a youth photography educational program, and was recognized by the Maryland Commission on African American History and Culture in 2019 for his arts and activism leadership. His latest book, No Justice, No Peace: From the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter, was released in 2022 under the Legacy Lit imprint of Hachette Book Group. In 2020, he was named an ambassador for Leica Camera AG—an international, premium manufacturer of cameras and sports optics. His forthcoming book, Baltimore, will be published by Steidl in June 2025.