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Artist Alex Prager Turns the Lens on Herself in Her Los Angeles Studio

The artist known for her enigmatic photographs and short films gives a behind-the-scenes look at her creative process ahead of the release of her first feature-length film

By Hilarie M. Sheets Photography by Alex Prager Fashion Styling by Deborah Afshani
Person smiling at a mannequin arm with a red glove pointing towards them against a plain background.
Alex Prager wears a Loewe sweater jacket dress.

In the dystopian universe of DreamQuil, the first feature-length film directed by Alex Prager, a woman who feels disconnected from her job and family goes on a virtual wellness retreat. She returns to find that as part of the stress-reduction package, the company sent an identical AI robot—a better version of herself—to take care of things at work and home in her absence.

“A nightmare ensues, of course,” Prager says of the drama between human and automaton, both played pitch-perfectly by Elizabeth Banks, concerning which one will actually inhabit the woman’s life. “All these questions come to mind: What is her identity if it’s not the little boring things like putting her kid to bed and phone calls at work and fights with her husband?”

Two people in a room, one significantly taller, both wearing casual outfits and looking at each other.
In a self-portrait at her Los Angeles studio, artist Alex Prager, wearing jacket, turtleneck, pants, and shoes by Hermès, gazes at her towering sculpture Big West (2019).
Surreal art with red pinwheel atop a phone booth, large face print in background, sunlight streaming through window.
A printer’s proof of Prager’s 2024 photograph Colossus hangs on a studio wall next to a miniature telephone booth replicated from her 2019 image Yellow Pages. The prosthetic hands on top were based on live models, the larger one fashioned after the artist’s mother.

Prager’s absurdist take, also starring John C. Reilly as the husband, is crafted like a psychological thriller, nodding to such cinematic inspirations as Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, and Douglas Sirk. “There’s a lot of laughing at ourselves in these characters,” says the artist. Aesthetically and tonally, DreamQuil is vintage Prager. Known for her uncanny color photographs and short films that blend a retro surface glamour and artifice with emotional gravitas, she often focuses on female protagonists in a state of transition.

The Los Angeles native found herself unmoored in the depths of COVID and was inspired to write the film’s story with her younger sister, painter Vanessa Prager, after seeing the humorous YearQuil meme, which touted a remedy to end 2020 by inducing sleep until it was over. Prager sent their script to Banks, who starred in her 2013 short film Face in the Crowd, shown in her first solo museum exhibition that year, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The actress not only agreed to take on the lead role in DreamQuil but also offered to be a producer. Paramount Republic Pictures and HanWay Films plan to release the film in late 2025 or early next year.

Woman in a pink dress running down a street past a fire hydrant and a large reflective mirror.
Still from Alex Prager’s 2022 Run.
People walking on a red carpeted floor, carrying suitcases and bags, wearing colorful coats and hats, from a top view.
Alex Prager, Santa Monica Airport (Departure), (2025). Photo: Courtesy Alex Prager Studio and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London
Surreal scene with people and a horse, including a scout, flag, laundry line, and mountain backdrop, creating a chaotic tableau.
Alex Prager, Western Mechanics, ( Photo: Courtesy Alex Prager Studio and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London
Surreal scene with a crowd, oversized woman figure, and a dusty car with "Wash Me" written on it, set in a sunny urban area.
Alex Prager, Big West, (2019). Photo: Courtesy Alex Prager Studio and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London

Prager has long employed the apparatus of full-scale movie magic to make her short films and still photographs, designing the look of her sets and her actors’ hair, makeup, and costumes, as well as shooting on soundstages with large crews after weeks of preproduction and storyboarding. But DreamQuil was by far the greatest challenge of her career. “I couldn’t believe how many things were trying to stop me,” she says. “It felt like I was in some video game—how many levels are there?”

A self-taught artist, Prager was born in Los Feliz in her grandmother’s back bedroom. She didn’t go to high school and at 14 began years of traveling in Europe. She eventually got her GED. After a series of dead-end jobs, she found herself at 20 sitting in an office cubicle, tears streaming down her face as she realized with clarity she could not allow this to be her future.

A woman in a white blouse reaches towards a suspended mannequin head with a yellow wig against a plain background.
A self-portrait of the artist with a vintage wig mannequin.
home office with wooden desk, adjustable lamp, two round lights, and movie posters on white walls
Inside Alex Prager’s studio.

“I was looking for my identity,” says Prager, who was inspired to buy a camera and experiment with photography after seeing a 2001 exhibition of color-saturated pictures by William Eggleston at the Getty Center. She found her own visual language mining the archetypes and milieu of old Hollywood, creating images that magnify intense psychological states such as fear and isolation.

“There is an interesting relationship in Prager’s characters between melodrama and realism that’s very complex,” says Roxana Marcoci, acting chief curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where she included Prager in the exhibition “New Photography 2010,” which helped launch the artist’s career. For the show, Prager made her first foray into film, a short called Despair, starring Bryce Dallas Howard, presented side by side with a close-up still of her suicidal character’s face staring into the existential abyss.

Person with long hair wearing a yellow sweater and a blue coat with white fur trim, standing against a plain background
In another self-portrait, Prager wears a Loewe sweater jacket dress.
Decorative hanger casting shadow on wall with geometric hook design and wooden knobs, illuminated by soft light.
A prototype of a resin hanger sculpture in Alex Prager’s Los Angeles studio features a close-up of a mouth, one of her recurring images of isolated body parts.

“I came up with this idea to make a still photograph that would be mirrored in the middle of the film, the before and after,” says Prager. She has since made almost a dozen short films in tandem with still pictures, featuring other stars such as Jessica Chastain and Cate Blanchett. The work has been exhibited at museums such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and at Lehmann Maupin’s galleries around the world. Prager approaches her short films as poetry, she says, “almost like a dash of paint, the exact right color.”

Two people in a room, one standing with a drink, the other seated holding a phone, near a large wall painting.
Inside Alex Prager’s studio.

Working on the feature film has reinvigorated her love of photography. “The more I get into narrative storytelling, the more I appreciate the still image,” says Prager. “The purpose of these suspended moments in time is very different than giving a full story. I always need them in parallel.”

A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2025 Fall Issue under the headline “Stranger Things.” Subscribe to the magazine.