Biography

Baltimore native Devin Allen is an international, award-winning self-taught photographer and artist who gained national attention when his photograph of the Baltimore Uprising was published on the cover of Time magazine in May 2015, making him only the third amateur photographer to have his work featured in the publication. Following the untimely deaths of George Floyd, Tony McDade, and Breonna Taylor, his photograph from a Black Trans Lives Matter protest was published on the cover of Time magazine in June 2020.

In 2017, he was named the first fellow of the Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship and was nominated for an NAACP Image Award as a debut author for his book, A Beautiful Ghetto (Haymarket Books, September 2017). In 2023, he was awarded the 2023 Gordon Parks Foundation / Steidl Book Prize.

In 2020, he was named an ambassador for Leica Camera AG—an international, premium manufacturer of cameras and sports optics.

His photographs have been published in New York Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Aperture; and are also in the permanent collections of the 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.

He is the founder of Through Their Eyes, a youth photography educational program, and recipient of an award from The Maryland Commission on African American History and Culture for dynamic leadership in the Arts and Activism.

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.

Most recently, he captured the main imagery for the sixth and final season of the hit SHOWTIME series, The Chi.