Biographical Notes
Paula Morin is a photographer and oral historian specializing in the photography of wild horses of the Great Basin region of the American West. For more than a decade, she has studied wild horses and conducted interviews about the horses' impact on the ecology and cultural landscape of Nevada.
Born in Hollywood, California, and raised in San Francisco, Morin’s admiration for horses was first inspired by her father, who was raised in Montana. They attended many horse races and polo matches during her childhood. Morin graduated magna cum laude from Southern Oregon University and later pursued post-graduate studies in photographic history and cultural anthropology. She became an independent photographer and field researcher and pursued an interest in the nineteenth-century technique of hand-painted black-and-white photography.
In 1999, Morin received a Rural Community Arts Assistance Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and the U.S. Forest Service which resulted in the exhibition Honest Horses: A Portrait of the Mustang in Nevada's Great Basin, supported by the Nevada Arts Council.