Lisa Leone

Lisa Leone (b. the Bronx, N.Y.) is a Miami-based artist who began her career as a photographer, capturing the earliest images of iconic musicians such as Nas, Lauryn Hill and Maxwell. She then expanded into cinematography, shooting music videos for artists including TLC, Heavy D, D'Angelo and The Brand New Heavies.

Leone worked with her mentor, Stanley Kubrick, on his final film, Eyes Wide Shut, and when he passed, she dove deeper into a study of the relationship between cinema and imagery. She continued to work as a cinematographer for directors including Nancy Savoca (Showtime’s Dirt and the theatrically released Union Square) and Michael Kang (The Motel, which premiered at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival), and on the Bravo show Citizen Reno.

Leone’s debut film as a writer, director and cinematographer, Exactly, starring Rosie Perez and Sarita Choudhury, was featured at the Tribeca, London and Sundance film festivals. She has since directed episodes of Grey’s Anatomy, Step Up: High Water and Greenleaf. In 2020, she directed an episode of Power Book III: Raising Kanan and was invited to shoot another episode the following year. More recently, Leone was in Albuquerque, N.M., to direct two episodes of Big Sky for ABC.

In 2019, Leone won a Suncoast Regional Emmy Award for the documentary Remembering Surrounded Islands, commissioned by Pérez Art Museum Miami. Her legendary work documenting hip-hop and the moments in between that have shaped the culture as we understand it today is collected in Here I Am: Photographs by Lisa Leone (2014) and featured in Contact High: A Visual History of Hip-Hop (2018).

Learn more about Lisa on her website here.

Commissioned artwork

Filmed by Jorge Gonzalez Graupera