Deanna Dikeman (b. 1954, Sioux City, Iowa) is an American photographer whose deeply personal work examines family, memory, aging, loss, and the passage of time. For nearly four decades, Dikeman has photographed the people and places closest to her, transforming the ordinary rituals of Midwestern family life into an expansive photographic record of intimacy and change.
Dikeman began photographing in 1985 after leaving a corporate career and enrolling in a photography class. Returning regularly to her childhood home in Sioux City, she began photographing her parents, relatives, family gatherings, domestic interiors, and the small recurring events that mark the passage of a life. Rather than setting out to construct a formal documentary project, Dikeman photographed intuitively and persistently, allowing meaning to accumulate over years and eventually decades.
Her best-known body of work, Leaving and Waving, grew almost accidentally from this larger family archive. Beginning in 1991, Dikeman photographed her parents standing in the driveway and waving goodbye each time she departed after a visit. She continued the ritual for 27 years. Seen sequentially, the photographs record subtle changes—the seasons, cars, clothing, the landscape, and, most poignantly, the aging and eventual absence of her parents. What began as a simple family gesture became a meditation on love, separation, mortality, and the inevitability of time.
The series received international attention following its publication in The New Yorker in 2020 and subsequently became Dikeman's first monograph, Leaving and Waving, published by Chose Commune in 2021. The book was a finalist for the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation First PhotoBook Award and received the 2021 Prix Nadar, one of France's most prestigious awards for a photography book. The project has since been exhibited internationally in museums, galleries, and photography festivals across 14 countries.
In 2024, Chose Commune published Relative Moments, a broader examination of nearly four decades of Dikeman's family photographs. Drawn from tens of thousands of images made between 1986 and 2023, the book places Leaving and Waving within the much larger body of work from which it emerged. Birthdays, holidays, meals, television, haircuts, illnesses, celebrations, aging bodies, changing rooms, and quiet domestic moments accumulate into a collective portrait of family life. Through repetition and duration, Dikeman turns seemingly inconsequential moments into evidence of both continuity and irreversible change.
Dikeman's work has received increasing institutional recognition in recent years. In 2026, the University of Missouri Museum of Art and Archaeology presented Deanna Dikeman: A Sense of Place, bringing together four bodies of work—Leaving and Waving, Relative Moments, Sue's House, and the newly introduced Donna's House—in an exhibition examining family, loss, home, and the significance of place. In 2025, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art acquired a substantial group of photographs from Leaving and Waving, further establishing the series within a major public collection.
Her photographs are held in permanent collections including the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Princeton University Art Museum; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park; Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Sedalia; University of Missouri Museum of Art and Archaeology, Columbia; FENIX, Rotterdam; and the Photographic Collection/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne, among others. Her work is also represented in the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, and the State Historical Society of Missouri.
Dikeman was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Photography in 2023. Earlier honors include an Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellowship in 1996 and a United States Artists Booth Fellowship in 2008. She holds a B.S. in Biology and an M.S. in Management from Purdue University.
Although grounded in the specificity of one family and one Midwestern place, Dikeman's photographs ultimately speak to experiences that are universal. Her work finds significance not in extraordinary events but in repetition, ritual, and the ordinary moments that become meaningful with the passage of time. What begins as a personal family archive gradually becomes something larger: a record of attachment, change, and the experience of watching the people we love move through their lives.
