Deanna Dikeman was born in 1954 in Sioux City, Iowa, USA. She has photographed her midwestern family and surroundings since 1985 when she left a corporate job to try a photography class. She graduated from Purdue University with a B.S. in Biology and a M.S. in Management. Deanna received the Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellowship in 1996, the United States Artists Booth Fellowship in 2008, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Photography in 2023.
Deanna’s largest and longest photography project documented her parents and other family in her hometown. That work included 27 years of photographs of her parents waving goodbye to her as she left from visiting them. “A Photographer’s Parents Wave Farewell” was one of the top 25 stories of 2020 in The New Yorker. She has two books published by Chose Commune: Leaving and Waving in 2021 and Relative Moments in 2024. Leaving and Waving was a finalist for the 2021 Paris Photo/Aperture Foundation First PhotoBook Award and won the 2021 Prix Nadar awarded by the Association Gens d’Images in France.
Photographs from Leaving and Waving have been exhibited at festivals, museums, and galleries in 13 countries: Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Switzerland, the UK, and the USA.