Marion Belanger photographs the cultural landscape, particularly where geology and the built environment intersect. With the support of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, she photograph the contested landscape of the Everglades, focusing both upon the wetlands in the protected National Park, and the now drained swampland of the historic Everglades, where housing developments, sugarcane fields, and water control structures occupy the landscape. For Rift/ Fault Belanger photographed the two land-based edges of the North American Continental Plate, along the San Andreas Fault in California, and the Mid-Atlantic Rift in Iceland. Belanger and collaborator Martha Lewis recently completed a permanent public art installation that utilized historic agricultural archives at the Connecticut Agricultural Experimental Station in New Haven.
Belanger was an honoree for the 2017 Shpilman International Prize for Excellence in Photography. She was a twice a fellow at the American Scandinavian Foundation, and has received grants from the Kittredge Foundation, the Puffin Foundation and the Artist Resource Trust. The artist is the author of Everglades: Outside and Within, with an essay by Susan Orlean (Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago, 2009), and Rift/ Fault, with an essay by Lucy Lippard (Radius Books, 2016), and Garden, Ranch House, and Edge (ROMAN NVMERALS). She resides in Guilford, Connecticut and teaches at the Hartford Art School, and in the Graduate Liberal Studies Program at Wesleyan University. She belongs to the two collectives: The Birthday Club, and Environmental Photographers.
