ABOUT ME
Bella Cook is a photographer from the Metro-Detroit area of Michigan. She is currently a student at Brown University in Providence, RI, where she studies Visual Art and Business Economics. As a contributor to PhotoVogue, her photography has been internationally recognized, with nine images published on Vogue.com. In Spring 2024, her work was awarded first prize in Brown University’s 44th Annual Juried Student Art Exhibition, curated by Jessica Brown and Sháńdíín Brown, at the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts. Most recently, Bella had a photograph on display in the Boston Wide Art Gallery at Harvard University. At Brown, Bella is involved with a number of groups where she blends her artistic and business talents. She is a speakers and screeners staff member of the Ivy Film Festival, a photographer for Fashion@Brown, an analyst for Brown’s Global Research Consulting club, the former art director of a student-run photography magazine, The Optic, and the former photographer and social media assistant for Brown’s Department of Music. In Summer 2025, Bella interned at Paramount Pictures, marketing their summer movie releases. In Fall 2025, Bella received Brown University’s Undergraduate Research Award Fellowship to conduct research with visual arts professor Becci Davis and visual artist Holly Ewald on their project, Unpolished Legacies. Her senior solo exhibition will debut in the spring of 2027.
I am always looking for opportunities to create! For inquiries and commissions:
ARTIST STATEMENT
I am a photographer who crafts performance-driven, staged images without the use of digital manipulation. My artistic vision was shaped by my first job as a host for children's birthday parties, where I spent weekends working to uphold the boundless, dreamlike imagination of kids. Now in my work, I aim to capture the in-between space of childhood, where raw earth and strange dreams meet, as something that can be experienced at any stage of life, as long as one continues to prioritize imagination. My imagination is inextricably linked to my sisters and my home state of Michigan.
My life has been shaped by the overwhelming presence of sisters— my blood sister and the non-blood sisters I have known since the day they were born. Though I am the oldest of all my sisters, we don’t function with age in mind; we exist together as equals. They are my mirrors and my guides, shaping how I see and experience the world. The women in my photographs are not strangers; they are the people I cry for in times of joy and sorrow, the ones who anchor me to the world with warmth and fire.
I am a Michigander. Michigan doesn't just hold my childhood, it preserves it. People often speak of their childhood as something in the past, something lost. But I find magic in Michigan’s dunes, lakes, and woods that preserve youth. To this day, my favorite activities consist of searching for Petoskey stones along the shores of Lake Michigan, building mud pies from clay and dirt, playing hide and seek in the woods, and swimming in the cool lake water.