Skye Battles is a photographer, writer, art director, and experience designer based in San Francisco.
She grew up in Los Angeles, dyslexic, and in a house full of photography books. Mapplethorpe, Opie, Arbus, and Crewdson images were her first language. She started taking photographs as a teenager, building elaborate sets with her friends, drawn to costume, staging, and the particular strangeness of growing up female in the entertainment capital of the world.
She spent her twenties living in Bay Area co-ops, throwing underground art events, and designing community spaces, building environments where people could physically inhabit the worlds she had been constructing in photographs. Her photography work during this period examined how alternative communities construct and perform identity. Raised by two mothers, she has always been drawn to the edges of mainstream culture and to the women who hold those spaces together.
At WIRED, Battles has served as photo editor for the politics and security desks, art directing photographers and collage artists for long-form features. She has reported, written, and photographed original photo essays for the magazine, developing an expanded approach to the form.
She has shown work in galleries across California and is currently developing new bodies of work.
