Deanna Dikeman was born in 1954 in Sioux City, Iowa, USA, and currently resides in Kansas City. Deanna is a 2023 John Simon Guggeneheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in Photography. She has photographed her midwestern family and surroundings since 1985, when she left a corporate job to try a photography class. She has M.S. and B.S. degrees from Purdue University. She received an Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellowship in 1996, and the United States Artists Booth Fellowship in 2008. Since 1988, Deanna has had 24 solo shows and has been included in over 160 group shows. Her photographs have been public art projects in Kansas City, Missouri; St. Louis, Missouri; and Albany, New York. “A Photographer’s Parents Wave Farewell” was one of the top 25 stories of 2020 in The New Yorker. Her work has also been published in Buzzfeed News JPG, Country Living, D la Repubblica, DUMMY, GEO, GUP, Harpers Magazine, M Le magazine du Monde, TAZ Berlin, Der Tagesspiegel Sonntag, The New York Times T Magazine, Réponses Photo, Slate Behold, theo, De Volkskrant Observatorium, and VOSTOK, among others. Her book Leaving and Waving was published by Chose Commune in 2021, after being short-listed for the MACK 2020 First Book Award. The book received the 2021 Prix Nadar awarded by the Association Gens d’Images in France. The book also was a finalist for the 2021 Paris Photo/Aperture Foundation First PhotoBook Award, and is now in its third printing. Photographs from Leaving and Waving have been exhibited at festivals, museums, and galleries in 12 countries: Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States.