Dustin Thierry is a contemporary artist and photographer whose work engages with the lived experiences of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, with a particular focus on the Netherlands and Costa Rica.


Born in 1985 in Willemstad, Curaçao, Thierry operates from a transnational perspective shaped by personal histories of migration, loss, and cultural hybridity. His practice explores themes of identity formation, Queer kinship, and collective memory. He treats photography as both an archival gesture and a ritual of repair—an act of witnessing that honors vulnerability as a form of resistance.

His ongoing project Dreaming Above the Atlantic traces Caribbean diasporic presence in Europe through intimate portraiture, while his more recent work in Cahuita, Costa Rica, reflects a broader archipelagic imagination—reconnecting with the Caribbean not as a place of return, but as a space for reorientation, healing, and spiritual continuity.

Thierry’s methodology is grounded in lived experience, collaboration, and a decolonial ethics of care—creating images that are not only documents, but relationships.

Thierry’s second major project, Opulence (2013–ongoing), emerged from a space of personal mourning and political urgency. It began in the aftermath of the suicide of his younger brother—a pansexual man who had long dreamed of escaping the rigid norms and homophobia of Curaçao to follow Thierry through Europe, camera in hand, learning to see the world as his brother did. In grieving this unfulfilled vision, Thierry turned his lens toward the European ballroom scene—not only as an act of remembrance, but as a form of speculative survival. His brother’s coming out as queer became, in many ways, Thierry’s own coming out as an artist. In photographing the community his brother never reached, he began assembling an archive of what could have been: a sanctuary of chosen kinship, fluid embodiment, and radical Queer joy.

Opulence resists the temptation to aestheticize pain; instead, it insists on the visibility of Queer, Black, and Caribbean bodies in their full, self-fashioned splendor. Across the project, Thierry’s images honor ballroom culture not as subculture, but as a political geography of care, defiance, and ancestral futurity. In doing so, Opulence has grown into a living and ever-expanding archive of queer expression across Europe—a poetic, raw, and necessary counter-narrative to dominant representations of Blackness, gender, and diaspora.

His work has been exhibited widely across Europe, Africa, and the Americas, including solo presentations at FOAM Photography Museum Amsterdam (2019) and the Van Abbemuseum (2020). Opulence was featured in The People’s Parliament of Rojava (2018–2019) and in international group shows such as Rencontres de Bamako: African Biennale of Photography (2019), Lagos Photo Festival (2019), Aperture Foundation in New York, and the Photo Vogue Festival at BASE Milano. Thierry has also exhibited at Leica Galerie Milan and Red Hook Labs, among others.

He was the first Black Dutch photographer to be selected for Rencontres de Bamako, and his work has been recognized by awards such as the Portrait of Humanity Award by the British Journal of Photography (2019), the Prix du Public at Villa Noailles Hyères (2020), the Decade Innovation Award from the Ministry of Social Affairs and the United Nations (2017), and the Selection of Dutch Photography Award (2019), of which he was the first Black recipient. Additional accolades include the Berry Koedam Award (2020), an honourable mention for the Hariban Award by Benrido (2020), and nominations for the FOAM Paul Huf Award (2021) and Joop Swart Masterclass.

Thierry’s photographs have been featured in The New York Times, The Financial Times, Magnum, Vogue, fluter, BLAU Magazine, Vice, Glamcult, and Der Greif. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Van Abbemuseum, FOAM Photography Museum, the Mauritshuis, and the Nederlands Fotomuseum.

Future chapters of his work will continue to trace the circulations of Blackness, Queerness, and memory—bringing him across the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia in search of new constellations of belonging, beauty, and resistance.

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