About Susana
Around 25 years ago, Susana Millman became a Bay Area photographer. In the spirit of her love for bad puns, she dubbed herself “mamarazi,” although she’s certainly more benign than the paparazzi. Best known for her photography of Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead from the mid-1980s on through later incarnations, she’s also spent a significant proportion of her professional life shooting dance (the Mark Morris Dance Group), travel (especially Asian religious architecture), events (the 50th anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge) and interiors, as sampled in this site’s galleries.
Her photographic intention is to capture the essence of a moment and leave a visually evocative memory of the experience. She loves the transcendent moments that occur when she and her camera are in rhythm with the subject, whether it is the peak of a dancer’s elevation, or perhaps feeling the intent of the designer in shooting interiors.
Susana spent the better part of the past several years creating and promoting her coffee table-size photography book, Alive with the Dead: A Fly on the Wall with a Camera, which was awarded a medal by the Independent Publishers Association in 2016. The book’s pictures provide an up-close and personal look at the band in its middle age and after, a product of the unusually intimate access to the band’s scene she developed as a friend of Garcia’s — which was why he came to play matchmaker and then walk her down the aisle at her wedding with Dead biographer and publicist Dennis McNally in 1985.
She and Dennis live in San Francisco, where they enjoy time spent with their daughter, Season Korchin, her husband Jono, and their grandsons, Julian and Elias. She is involved with a variety of progressive causes and works with two international programs that support literacy, Caravan to Class in Mali, and 100 schools in Myanmar.
Her photos are available for licensing, and for sale as custom fine art prints in various sizes. Email Susana for more info.