"In the steps of each ordinary day, I am waiting, ready for something to visually interrupt me. Something to make me gasp. Sometimes it is a natural phenomenon. Sometimes it is a gesture or a gaze. Sometimes it is the intensity of color or light. I feel jolted, awe-inspired, and urged to remember it. I photograph it as a way to get closer to the moments that leave me breathless, as a way to stop time."
Cig’s photographs and books are in the permanent collections of museums across the world, including The Library of Congress (NewYork, New York): Yale University (New Haven, Connecticut); Museum of Fine Arts (Houston, Texas); the Farnsworth Art Museum (Rockland, Maine); and the International Museum of Photography and Film at the George Eastman House (Rochester, New York). She is represented by galleries worldwide and has exhibited at Paris Photo, Art Miami, and at AIPAD (New York) for the past fifteen years. She had her first solo museum show at the Stenersen Museum in Oslo, Norway (2012), and more recently at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art in Maine (2019).
Cig was awarded the Prix Virginia Laureate (2018) and the Farnsworth Art Museum’s Maine in America Award (2021). She has been a nominee for the John Gutmann Fellowship, the Santa Fe\ Prize, and the Prix Pictet, and a finalist for the BMW Prize, the Estee Lauder Collection, the Karl Lagerfeld Collection at Paris Photo, the Clarence John Laughlin Award, and the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize. Most recently in 2022 Eat flowers won the Fine Press Book Associations Judge’s Choice Award for Best Book in Show at the Manhattan Fine Press Book Fair. Cig is the beneficiary of JP Morgan's Highlighted Artist at this year's Paris Photo 2022.
Cig lives in a farmhouse in Maine with her husband Doug and daughter Scout. The slow passing of time and the natural surroundings of her rural home has made her alert to the magic in the mundane.
Cig is a member of the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) and the Society of Professional Journalism (SPJ).
Selected Collections:
George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY
Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art, Hamilton, Bermuda
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
The Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME
Bowdoin College, Special Collections, Brunswick, ME
University of Washington, Special Collections, Seattle, WA
Delta Air Lines, Atlanta, Georgia