Gabrielle Motola is an artist, writer, and educator.

She grew up between the United States and Canada, changing schools every two or three years until university. As an adult, she lived in France, the United Kingdom, and Iceland. That itinerant childhood, with its repeated need to read unfamiliar rooms, understand new cultures, and make herself understood across languages, gave rise to an early adulthood wanderlust and became the foundation of everything that followed: a deep interest in how people work, how groups cohere, and what passes between individuals in the act of communication.

Her work uses reality not as a record but as material. She explores intimacy, identity, and the ethics of relating, drawn toward light and beauty, not in avoidance of difficulty, but because she has learned to find peace there. A background in psychology and a decade working as an editor and colourist in cinema shaped how she sees.

Her books are An Equal Difference (2016), an exploration of gender, crisis, and cultural resilience in post-2008 Icelandic society, and Elūl (2025), a meditation on perception, attachment, and what we bring into romantic relationships. She is a co-director and senior member of the Photobook Club Collective, through which she exhibits at international art and photobook fairs and supports independent publishing practice across the photographic community.

What began as a personal confrontation with fear became her Exposure Therapy workshop, which uses street portraiture and the psychology of direct encounter to help participants reframe fear, build confidence, and stay present in the world. Her postgraduate training in counselling and therapeutic photography at Robert Gordon University grounds this work in both theory and method.

Alongside her creative practice, she works as a specialist adviser in photographic art, drawing on sustained practice-based research into editioning, provenance, and the challenges of value in a reproducible medium. She lectures on this material and supports artists in developing the business literacy that a sustainable, self-determining practice requires.

Awards

2023 AOP Photography Awards: Portraiture Gold 2023 • Women Street Photographers 2023 • Portrait of Humanity2022 • Portrait of Britain 2022 • Head On Photo Festival 2022 • RPS IPE 164 Shortlisted 2022 • KLPA Awards 2022 • Women Street Photographers 2021 • Portrait of Britain 2021 • RPS IPE 163 Shortlisted 2021 • Julia Margaret Cameron Awards 2021 • Lucie Foundation Award 2020 • Equal Lens “Two Metres of Separation” 2020 • AOP Photography Awards 2019 • AOP Photography Awards 2018 • Taylor Wessing National Portrait Prize Shortlist 2014

Publications

Amateur Photographer - ‘Eye Contact’ feature article - March 2026
Amateur Photographer - Peter Dench Reviews Elūl - February 2026
Royal Photographic Society - Photographing The Invisible- 2024
Photowalk Podcast Interviews 2020 - 2024
Soul of Street Issue 49 Feature Interview 2023
Capturing Emotive Portraits with the Sigma fpL
Tea & Water Talks 2021
JC Candanedo- A World That Others Can’t See 2020
Stranger Curiosity Podcast 2019 (Creator and Host)
Portraits of Strangers - Sean Tucker 2019
Henge to Henge- The Guardian 2018