Leigh Merrill is a Dallas-based contemporary artist whose practice centers on photography, digital collage, and video. Her work explores photographic perception and the physical and cultural formation of place, questioning photography’s ability to operate simultaneously as evidence of reality and as a tool for constructing it.
Merrill photographs architecture, landscaping, storefronts, streets, gardens, and other elements of the built environment. She then digitally combines thousands of individual images to construct places that do not exist. Although her finished works initially resemble straightforward photographs, their seamless surfaces gradually reveal altered proportions, repeated forms, impossible perspectives, and visual inconsistencies.
Through this process, Merrill examines the tension between truth and fiction within photographic images. Her compositions consider how architecture, landscaping, development, and consumer aesthetics communicate cultural ideas about beauty, success, progress, and belonging. Manicured lawns, decorative plants, simulated historical architecture, construction sites, and commercial spaces become evidence of the desire and perpetual longing embedded within contemporary American landscapes.
Born in 1978, Merrill grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of New Mexico and her Master of Fine Arts from Mills College in Oakland, California. She currently lives and works in Dallas, where she is a professor of art at East Texas A&M University.
Merrill’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally. Selected venues include Paris Photo in France, Centre de la photographie Genève in Switzerland, the Fries Museum in the Netherlands, the Phoenix Art Museum, the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, FotoFest International, the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, and the Museum of Texas Tech University. Her work has also been presented in solo exhibitions at the Old Jail Art Center, Lawndale Art Center, Women & Their Work, and Liliana Bloch Gallery.
In 2022, Merrill presented Collecting Forests at Liliana Bloch Gallery and a solo presentation in the Curiosa sector of Paris Photo. The series examined the relationship between constructed environments and natural landscapes, particularly the ways forests are observed, altered, collected, and digitally reconstructed.
In 2026, Liliana Bloch Gallery presented Window and Wind, an exhibition of new works created by combining, layering, and redacting photographic information. The resulting images moved between recognizable architectural spaces and more fluid compositions, continuing Merrill’s investigation of how photographs influence perceptions of reality.
Merrill’s work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Afterimage, Places Journal, Dwell, The Dallas Morning News, and the Houston Chronicle. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, the Old Jail Art Center, the Museum of Texas Tech University, the University of North Texas Print Study Collection, the City of Phoenix Art and Culture Permanent Collection, and the California Institute of Integral Studies.
Leigh Merrill lives and works in Dallas and is represented by Liliana Bloch Gallery. Her photography is available through the gallery for Dallas art collectors interested in contemporary photography, digitally constructed landscapes, conceptual art, and artists represented in museum collections.