Photography Educator: Dana Fritz

Photography Educator: Dana Fritz by Elizabeth StoneSeptember 12, 2025

©Dana Fritz, Betula papyrifera: an elegy, (2022, hand bound artist book,) takes the form of a scroll in which photographs of decaying, hollow birch trees are unfurled by a viewer. Paper birch trees have relatively short life spans but decompose slowly on the forest floor. Long after the inner wood has been recycled by insects and fungi, their water-resistant bark skins remain as hollow horizontal forms, vestiges of a bygone climate.

Photography Educator is a monthly series on Lenscratch. Once a month, we celebrate a dedicated photography teacher by sharing their insights, strategies and excellence in inspiring students of all ages. These educators play a transformative role in student development, acting as mentors and guides who create environments where students feel valued and supported, fostering confidence and resilience.

It gives me great pleasure to feature photographer, book artist and educator Dana Fritz and a few of her students this month. Dana’s dedication to her own photographic practice is readily apparent in the deeply researched and visually sophisticated books she shared for this article. As a Professor of Art in the School of Art, Art History & Design at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln School of Art, her teaching approach centers on immersive creative exploration, encouraging critical reflection and the growth of independent artistic voices within a supportive community. Her students’ work is conceptually strong, diverse and interesting, a testament to Dana’s commitment as an educator. Dana’s thoughtful responses to my questions in this interview make clear that she is deeply invested in supporting her students, going beyond expectations to help them cultivate a rich and long lasting artistic practice.

This article starts with a sampling of Dana’s work in book form.

Engaging ideas about climate change, environmental history, and ecology, I work to reveal the ways we shape and know the land in prints and books. My practice involves remote library and archival research as well as on site ground truthing through observation and photography. Black and white images expose human and non-human patterns while the page spreads, sequences, and texts of books offer pathways to interpretation and interrogation of our relationship to place.

Compass Plant/Map, (2023, artist book,) is inspired by Silphium laciniatum’s flat vertical map-like leaves that point north and south but face east and west. Photographs of their flat, planar leaves are layered with a topographic map of the collection site with topographic lines that resemble the shape of compass plant leaves. The outside includes text prepared as if it were an herbarium specimen, including the collector and the site of collection.

©Dana Fritz, from the project Compass Plant/Map, 2023, artist book

©Dana Fritz, from the project Compass Plant/Map, 2023, artist book

ES: How and why did you get into teaching? Did you always want to be a teacher?

DF: Yes, I always wanted to be a teacher (and a student.) Even as a child I loved school and loved learning. In fact, I never stopped going to school. I went from preschool to graduate school to adjunct teaching to my job at University of Nebraska without a break. I don’t necessarily recommend this for everyone, but I couldn’t imagine myself doing anything else.

ES: What keeps you engaged as an educator?

DF: This week I am preparing for my 28th year teaching at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, my first fulltime, tenure-track teaching job. I was hired to teach in an interdisciplinary foundations program where I mostly taught drawing, but moved to photography in fall 2011, so I have only been teaching photography at UNL for the last 14 years. This big change has kept me on my toes, along with teaching a study abroad course in Japan for 10 years and regularly teaching a Capstone course for graduating seniors of all studio areas. Teaching in these various contexts has keep me engaged and constantly reconsidering how I can make course experiences more meaningful and empowering for students. Since 2012, I have worked closely with graduate students as instructor, advisor, and mentor. This experience has taught me so much and I am grateful for the structure of our program that fosters this kind of exchange.

My basic teaching philosophy evolved over many years with the luxury of teaching relatively small undergraduate classes and working mostly independently with graduate students. In a studio art course with an average enrollment of under 16 that meets 5-6 hours per week, I get to know each student as an individual. The better I know them, the more I can help them. In these ideal learning settings, I recognize my students’ faces, voices, and developing visual language. I learn their individual strengths and challenges and work with them to identify and achieve goals based on the stated learning objectives and sometimes outside of them. This way of teaching demands a great deal of creativity on my part because each student may need a different approach or example to inspire or explain. Each interaction with a student draws on creative problem solving that is analogous to my own process as an artist. I also learn from each student how better to help them and others. This is an exceptionally rewarding teaching situation for me and many students stay in touch after graduating to update me on their accomplishments.

ES: Did you have an influential photography mentor or teacher? What was their biggest impact on you?

DF: I have had many influential teachers of all kinds over the years, but I learned some key things that shaped my work from three people. Patrick Clancy, a photography instructor at Kansas City Art Institute taught me that I could be motivated by and make art informed by ideas outside of myself and photography, pushing the bounds of traditional prints. Wendy Geller, his colleague and my video teacher at KCAI, taught me to take my work seriously and seek challenges, new information, and new experiences to feed it. Mark Klett taught me about understanding place in all its dimensions when I had the good fortune to work with him and others on a grant project about water in the Phoenix area (c. 1992-1995!) While I was never technically his student during my grad program at Arizona State University, he was certainly a mentor through this project. Each of these people modeled the life of an artist and professor when I was just learning what that could mean.

ES: What are some of the assignments that you give your students?

DF: One of my teaching goals in Intermediate and Advanced Photography where students work on self-directed projects is to foster student understanding of their work in multiple dimensions so they will be able to talk about it, write about it, and develop it. To support this, I assign an interview by a classmate where a student is asked to speak freely and without fear of not knowing all the answers right away. The questions span the student’s visual language, subject, content, process, inspiration/input, and intentions for the work. A related assignment is “Show and Tell: Research and Inspiration” where students share several times throughout the semester what they are looking at, reading, watching, etc. and how it supports their work. I require library visits so many of the items shared are photobooks from UNL’s large collection, but students also share artists websites, interviews, technical information, or readings from other disciplines.

In the Beginning Darkroom class, I have been increasingly concerned with the ever-higher cost of paper and film as well as the environmental cost of silver-based photography. In an effort to address both concerns, I developed a collage assignment in which students must use only printed materials that were deemed unfit for critiques: test strips, test prints, bad prints, etc. This assignment is the last of the semester in which they have saved everything they printed and incorporate it into a large piece or series that enables them to make work at a much larger scale than the typical 8×10 prints in a beginning course. It also diverts silver-based paper from the landfill.

One of my favorite courses to teach is an Environment/Landscape/Photography seminar, a mixed undergraduate and graduate course in which students read texts, lead discussions and presentations, and propose exhibitions of photography from the Sheldon Museum of Art’s collection. Over the last decade, I have taught this course four times and each time the Sheldon curatorial staff selected one or two student-curated exhibitions to install at the museum. Until taking this class, many students dismissed landscape photography as a genre that was mostly concerned with beauty. Through looking critically at landscape representations in photography, we can discuss food and energy systems, land ownership, recreation, conservation, and the conflict that arises when people with differing philosophies set sights on the same land. Students comment on how much they valued and were challenged by the readings, discussions, and experience of curating an exhibition for the museum. Some have even gone on to include curatorial practice in their varied professional work.

ES: How do you integrate your experience and success as an artist into your teaching practice?

DF: I share my successes AND failures/rejections with students. I share that I spend more time writing grants, proposals, etc. and on email correspondence than on actually making photographs and that my acceptance rate is not that high. I tell students that each rejection should inspire another application or proposal rather than a pitiful sulk. These admissions are revelatory, not only to my photography students, but to the graduating Capstone students in studio art I teach every semester and who assumed that their faculty are naturally and consistently successful. I am especially excited to share Natalie Krick’s new book published by Composit Press, We are Sorry that You Applied this Year. Natalie’s rejection letters that were modified by deleting large amounts of text have me laughing out loud and feeling seen while commiserating.

ES: What has been your biggest sacrifice?

DF: One of my biggest sacrifices of my own studio time was an investment in my students: when I moved from teaching foundations to photography 14 years ago, I spent two summers and countless hours during the academic year overhauling photo lab and curriculum. I supervised and partially conducted the renovation of languishing facilities to support the curricular changes that include a greater emphasis on and integration with digital technology as well as reinvestments in traditional processes.

Re: forest, (2022, hand bound artist book,) follows the circular path from Nebraska’s Bessey Nursery to where seedlings are planted in Pike, Roosevelt, and Medicine Bow National Forest areas in Colorado and Wyoming that have suffered catastrophic wildfire and beetle infestations. The photographs loop from the nursery to the forests and back, reminding us that we are inextricably part of this process and that our work to maintain forests is ongoing.

©Dana Fritz, from the project Re: forest, 2022 hand bound artist book

©Dana Fritz, from the project Re: forest, 2022 hand bound artist book

©Dana Fritz, from the project Re: forest, 2022 hand bound artist book

Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape (2023, University of Nebraska Press,) reveals the human and non-human forces shaping what was once the world’s largest hand-planted forest in what is now the world’s largest intact prairie. Black and white photographs offer contrasts of patterns from the forces of sand, wind, water, planting, thinning, fire, decomposition, and sowing that contribute to its unique environmental history.