Derek Zhao is currently a machine learning engineer at Disney after retiring from a past life composing music for film and television, with music department contributions to Toy Story 3, The Princess and the Frog, and The Walking Dead. He has since worked in data and ML roles at NASA, Electronic Arts, and Discord.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Derek Zhao is a Bay Area photographer working in a quiet, formalist tradition: vast skies, fog, hypnotic rhythms, and long stretches of negative space, often anchored by a single small element within the frame. The work is built on the premise that form gives rise to clarity, and clarity is what allows an image to communicate. Rather than documenting a moment, each photograph seeks to isolate the underlying structure of a scene, using reduction and stillness as tools for making sense of a chaotic world and offering that sense-making to the viewer.