Gwen Coyne was born in New Jersey, USA. She received a B.A. in painting and psychology, from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Currently, she leads a creative strategy team in Oakland, California.
Her ongoing project, "The Early Years," chronicles memoirs from her daughter's childhood that evoke a fantastical yet tenuous sense of space and time—periods of respite between bouts of illness triggered by asthma. More interested in collecting snippets evocative of childhood than in documenting specifics, Gwen hopes that over time this series of short stories will form a more comprehensive portrait of her daughter's early years—leaving room for her imagination and memory to fill in the gaps. Also inspired by the mobile photography movement that has reshaped visual culture and the access to information, she frequently uses her phone for a less invasive, more immediate response to what's going on around her, in the series "From Where I'm Calling."
Gwen is a Getty Images contributor, and her pictures have been published in B&W Magazine, Better Photography, Burn Magazine, CAPA Magazine, Click Magazine, Corriere della Sera, Feature Shoot, Fotopolis, Fotoritim, Glamour Netherlands, Instagram, LensCulture, Newsweek Japan, and Prestel. She has had a selection of photographs exhibited internationally at places such as the Denver International Airport in Colorado, the Perfect Exposure Gallery in California, the Photo Center in Moscow, Russia and the Can Basté Centre in Barcelona, Spain.
She has also contributed to "Out of the Phone", the world's first Instagram photo book, which garnered attention from The Guardian and L'Oeil de la Photographie, in addition to receiving CNN's editor's choice. She has a photo featured in David Gibson's "100 Great Street Photographs", and is a member of the 14&15 Mobile Photographers collective, on Instagram. A long time ago, she participated in "Finding Lost Time"—a collaborative book and photography exhibition traveling through Europe—that included artists from around the world.
David Gibson