Keron Psillas Oliveira is a photographer, writer, instructor and mentor, with an extensive background in the print and publishing industry. She grew up in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, where she learned the printing and publishing industry first-hand after purchasing the family business. Keron became a professional photographer in 2006. She teaches photography courses, book making classes, equine photo workshops, and maintains a robust mentoring program for students in the US and abroad. She is the former director of the Art Wolfe Digital Photography Center, and is a longtime assistant to photographic legends Sam Abell and Arthur Meyerson. She leads bespoke photography tours throughout Europe and Japan. Her work on the Holocaust (Loss and Beauty and A Song of Death and Dying) has been exhibited extensively; as has her horse photography (Cavalo Lusitano: The Spirit Within and Lusitano: noble, courageous, eternal, from Veritas Editions), most notably at the Griffin Museum of Photography. Each of these projects has received international awards and Cavalo Lusitano resides in the Rare Book Collections of the Library of Congress and the Getty Museum among many other esteemed collections. She was the featured solo artist in the Pingyao International Photography festival of 2024 for her work Floraveira: Edge of Revelation, her new collection of floral exploration. She has also created a new collection of floral textiles (Floraveira) and bespoke furniture that is receiving rave reviews. Floraveira is scheduled for exhibition in several venues in Europe and the US in 2025. Her latest book, A Song of Death and Dying, the culmination of 16 years of work in the bloodlands of Eastern Europe, will be released in winter of 2025/2026.

Artist statement
Floraveira was born of a desire to hold on to fleeting beauty. As a gardener I lived for the moment of bloom, hard work would burst into color and form and then I would watch as the blossoms and plant matured, slowly morphing into another form. As a lover of paintings (a gallery stalker from my teens until today) I consume the shape, line, color and expression in all the ages of fine art. As a photographer in my Floraveira series, I want to bring all those impulses to bear; all the form, emotion, and expression that I cherish, make it visible, and hold on to it forever! Choosing, painstakingly arranging, freezing (through much trial and error) and photographing the flowers through the entire process allows me to create the final portrait. It is most gratifying to see my ideas and desire take form, and more gratifying still when the ice gives me a surprise that underscores my original intent. It is as if there is an understanding, an exchange that happens when my thought is fully formed and the ice takes over. Then I dance on a sort of edge of revelation. I want to reveal, and hold, what is with a nod to what will become. Fully inhabiting the present moment while living with the awareness of inevitable change encapsulates that revelation and is a mirror to my own evolution as an artist and as a human.  

Floraveira, from Flora (Roman goddess of flowers, beauty and from the Latin root of flower) and ‘veira’…root for Truth in Portuguese and Latin as well as part of my name…

Keron Psillas Oliveira.