Ongoing Projects
- Previous Projects
- Fake Fashion
- Give Me 1 Minute
- Commissioned Work
Portrait/Fashion Photographer and Visual Artist
Joy Island Lei is a Portrait/Fashion Photographer and Visual Artist currently based between New York and Beijing.
She received her Master’s Degree in Digital Photography from the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 2025.
Since 2009, she has worked for clients like Nike, Canon, Benefit, and Huawei, magazines like Cosmopolitan China, L’Officiel China, and Timeout Beijing, doing commercial, fashion, and portrait photography.
Her works often focus on the emotions of specific groups, blending bold colors, fashion aesthetics, and personal narratives to present a distinct female perspective. For example, since 2009, she has been dedicated to her personal project Give Me 1 Minute, spending over a decade documenting the faces of more than one hundred young people in China, presenting a post-pop style collective portrait of contemporary youth from an intimate perspective.
In 2015, her work Klein Red was featured on the homepage of Vogue Italia's PhotoVogue. She has been interviewed and featured by various media outlets, including Vogue Me, China Photography, Marie Claire NOW, and WWD. In 2020, she was selected as a finalist for the Three Shadows Photography Award and the Photo Open Up Festival in Padova, Italy. She also won the silver prize at the Beijing Fashion Week Photography Competition. In 2021, she was nominated for the Young Photographers Award at the Pingyao International Photography Festival. From 2022 to 2024, she was selected as a finalist at ASVOFF in Paris, and her works were exhibited multiple times at Photofairs Shanghai.
In 2025, she launched a new photography project in New York focusing on situations and migration stories of Asian women, with the works included in her new book Pink Fantasy, which was exhibited at the SVA Gramercy Gallery in Manhattan in September of the same year.
Joy Island Lei
Photo by Roca Beijing Gallery
Always looking for co-creation in New York and beyond!
Feel free to email me at joyislandstudio@gmail.com
and follow me on Instagram @joyisland 🍎🫰
Always looking for co-creation in New York and beyond!
Feel free to email me at joyislandstudio@gmail.com
and follow me on Instagram @joyisland 🍎🫰