Biography

                             Self-portrait with her Afghan hounds Bashir and Tiziano.

Sabrina van den Heuvel (1986, Netherlands) is a photographer and multidisciplinary image-maker based in The Hague. Her practice moves between photography, installation and narrative image-making, where the image becomes a space in which inner states and emotional landscapes take form.

At the core of her work lies an exploration of how vulnerability, desire and transformation can be translated into image. Working primarily in black-and-white, she constructs a visual language defined by strong contrasts, sculptural light and a direct emotional intensity. Her images move between stillness and tension, proximity and distance, seeking form for what resists resolution.

Her practice unfolds through a balance of control and surrender: carefully composed images that remain bodily, intuitive and emotionally charged. The body appears as a site of meaning, where memory, emotion and art historical layers intersect. Drawing from classical art, music, fashion and religious iconography, she reactivates historical imagery within a contemporary sensibility.

A sustained engagement with art history and philosophy—particularly existential thought—forms an underlying structure within her work. These fields do not function as references alone, but shape how images are constructed, experienced and understood.

Van den Heuvel graduated from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague in 2008. In 2017 she was artist-in-residence at the Netherlands Interuniversity Institute for Art History (NIKI) in Florence, where she developed the photographic series Corpus Dei. Inspired by the landscapes of Florence and Rome, the archaeological remains of Tivoli, and the works of Caravaggio and Michelangelo, the series reflects on the body as both historical and spiritual form. The work was published by Lecturis (2019) and launched at Sotheby’s Amsterdam.

Her work has been recognized by Fotomuseum Den Haag and has been presented internationally, including in New York.

In addition to her autonomous practice, she has photographed figures from music and performance, including Italian singer and composer Giancarlo Prandelli and Rahim Redcar (formerly known as Christine and the Queens). Redcar’s work moves between music, performance and the fluid construction of identity—an approach that closely resonates with Van den Heuvel’s own exploration of the body as a shifting, expressive presence. Their encounter moves beyond portraiture into a shared space where image and identity remain in motion, and where presence is not fixed, but continuously unfolding.

Her current practice expands photography into spatial and immersive installations, culminating in Contritio Cordis, her most extensive project to date, developed over seven years and still in progress. Created in the former psychiatric hospital of Volterra in Italy, the project unfolds through photography, installation and narrative elements, transforming the image into an experiential space where inner rupture, transformation and vulnerability become physically and sensorially present.