Briana Blasko is a San Francisco–born portrait photographer whose work explores the intersection of culture, craft, and contemplative practice. She has spent the past two decades living and working between India and California, with extended periods in New York, where she spent twelve years photographing contemporary dance, including work for The New York Times.

For more than thirteen years, Briana has quietly traversed the Indian subcontinent, documenting the country’s rich textile and dance traditions and the intricate dialogue between them. This long-term body of work culminated in a series of photographic books, including Dance of the Weave (Penguin India) and Within Without: The Path of the Yogi (Harper Collins India.)

She began her photographic career conducting research for Annie Leibovitz and Susan Sontag on their book Women. Her photographs have since appeared in numerous international publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue India, NPR, CNN, Dance Magazine, Selvedge, and Marg, among others. In 2018, The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired selected works from Dance of the Weave for its permanent collection.

While much of Briana’s practice is rooted in solitary, long-form documentation, her work is deeply collaborative, shaped by years of engagement with artists, weavers, and dancers. Her photographs offer an intimate window into worlds defined by discipline, devotion, and refinement—many of which are rapidly disappearing. Central to her approach is a sustained inquiry into how things are made and how they are lived, revealing the depth of human creativity and cultural continuity.

In Within Without: The Path of the Yogi, Briana shifts her focus from external expressions of mastery to the inner landscape of renunciation and contentment. It is within this dynamic tension—between creation and contemplation—that her work continues to evolve. Originally published by HarperCollins India in 2017, Within Without was accompanied by exhibitions in New Delhi, Goa, New York, and Los Angeles.

Briana is currently working on several new book projects, including a forthcoming project titled Spiritual India (Prakash Books), to be released in fall 2026. She is also developing two additional photographic books: one tracing the story of cotton grown in the United States and its global reach, and another exploring the practice of yoga. She currently shares her time in between California and India with her husband, Thomas, and their daughter, Sana.

“One of the many strengths of Blasko’s photography is her point-of-view that is specific and expansive, material and non-material; and the way she is able to handle both the micro and macro aspects in wonderful juxtaposition. This is difficult, as what she captures in still-frames are essentially complex movements – fluid lines of both the inherent threads of fabrics-weave and the residual time-lapse arcs of dance choreography.”

— Outlook Magazine

“The loveliness of her images in the book you are holding resides in their ability to share the restless conversation between body and fabric. At times, the dancer and the dance blur into one, and it becomes hard to separate the two art form – the weave and the rhythm – from each other… I fell in love with Briana’s Indigo series, the churning beauty unleashed by the indigo plant…”

— Donna Karan

“Her images of “swirling, rushing water and the synchronized limbs of indigo workers” erases the idea of natural dyes as an easy, gentle pursuit and reveals the incredible physicality required to produce indigo. Similarly her photographs of looms underscore the intricacy of the process and the graceful movements of the weavers…. Dance of the Weave has the potential to become a classic. No other photographer has approached the vast subject of India in quite the same way.”

— Selvedge Magazine