J. Mack is a Brooklyn-based visual artist whose constructed portraiture examines how family, gender, domestic performance, and American normalcy are staged, inherited, and believed.

Born in the suburbs of Detroit in 1982, J. Mack graduated from Parsons School of Design in 2005, received the Tierney Fellowship the same year, and joined Laurence Miller Gallery, where her early work was exhibited as Julie Mack. Her photographs have been exhibited at Art Basel, Paris Photo at the Louvre, and ARCO Madrid; acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where they are held in the permanent collection; and shortlisted for the Paris Photo Prize for Contemporary Photography. Her work has appeared in LIFE, Time, The New York Times, and New York Magazine.

J. Mack has also worked across documentary and commercial filmmaking, art direction, and creative leadership. She co-founded THEY, a Brooklyn-based production studio, where she led creative work for clients and institutions including the Ford Foundation, the Vilcek Foundation, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Penguin Books, and NASA.

Her primary body of work, Evidence & Fiction, has developed over more than two decades through constructed portraits of the white, middle-American family she was born into, the family she entered through her partner, and the family she has made. As a gender-nonconforming queer artist working both inside and outside these systems, she is inside the room but outside the script — implicated in the families she pictures, never fully absorbed by them.

The work treats the family photograph as evidence, fiction, and agreement at once — a record of real people, a staged image of belonging, and a contract about how a person is allowed to appear.

She returned to full-time studio practice in 2024. Working in medium- and large-format film, she builds each picture from multiple frames staged and composited into a single, unstable whole — and is now sequencing Evidence & Fiction toward its first significant public form, a photobook and exhibition, where the argument lives in the order of the pictures.