Daniel Heyman

Daniel Heyman is an American printmaker and painter whose work since the mid-2000s has been principally concerned with the testimony of vulnerable communities — Iraqi survivors of detention at Abu Ghraib prison, U.S. military sexual assault survivors, and Native Americans living on reservations in North Dakota, among others. He has taught printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) since 2004, where he holds the title of Senior Critic, and he has also taught at Princeton University. In 2010 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Fine Arts, following a Pew Fellowship in the Arts in 2009.

Heyman is a cum laude graduate of Dartmouth College and holds an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. His best-known work grew out of the Abu Ghraib detainee interview project: beginning in 2006 he travelled with an American human-rights attorney to Amman, Jordan, and later to Istanbul, Turkey, to observe interviews with former detainees. As each person gave testimony, Heyman drew their portrait directly onto a copper plate and surrounded it with their words, etched in his own hand. The resulting Amman and Istanbul portfolios — the Istanbul group comprising ten drypoints — became one of the most widely discussed bodies of contemporary American political portraiture.

Heyman extended this testimony method into related American contexts, making series on women in the U.S. military who had survived sexual assault and, in Native Impressions: In Our Own Words (2017–18), a collaboration with Lucy Ganje documenting Native American communities in North Dakota. In more recent years he has moved away from overtly political subjects toward studio work exploring inheritance, mortality, and personal place, increasingly incorporating Japanese woodblock (mokuhanga) and papermaking techniques — an interest that dates to a Nagasawa residency in Japan where he studied Japanese printmaking — alongside his primary intaglio practice. He is represented by Cade Tompkins Projects in Providence.

Heyman's prints are held in more than thirty-five museum and university collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Library of Congress, and his testimony work has been shown at venues such as Brown University's Bell Gallery, in the exhibition I am Sorry It is Difficult to Start. Throughout his career he has approached printmaking as a tool of witness and documentary record rather than as a primarily aesthetic enterprise, using drypoint and copper-plate etching as the channel for politically urgent testimony.