About The Project
The Grace Project is about what remains.
The body after cancer, the person beyond the diagnosis, and the beauty, dignity, and power that remain even after the body has been forever changed.
Founded in 2009 by fine art photographer Charise Isis, The Grace Project uses portraiture to honor people affected by breast cancer and the bodies that have carried them through it.
For many participants, standing before Charise’s camera means revealing a body they have spent months or years learning how to inhabit again. Mastectomy scars. Reconstructed breasts. Flat chests. Asymmetry. Bodies altered by surgery, treatment, illness and survival.
The portrait session creates a space where those changes do not need to be hidden, corrected or apologized for.
They are simply seen.
Charise’s portraits are inspired by ancient Hellenistic sculptures such as the Venus de Milo, works that have survived centuries of damage, loss and the passage of time. Their missing pieces do not diminish their beauty. We stand before them in museums with reverence.
The Grace Project asks us to look at the human body with that same reverence.
These bodies carry scars. They carry absence. They carry histories of illness, fear, grief, endurance, love and extraordinary change. And still, they are beautiful.
800
When The Grace Project began, Charise set out to create 800 portraits, representing the approximate number of people diagnosed with breast cancer in the United States every day.
In October 2023, she photographed the 800th portrait.
But reaching 800 was never the end.
Today, The Grace Project includes more than 1,200 portraits, and Charise continues to photograph people navigating breast cancer, metastatic disease, mastectomy, reconstruction, aesthetic flat closure and life after treatment.
The project has become an ever-growing visual archive of bodies and stories that are too often absent from the way breast cancer is publicly represented.
At the heart of the project remains the vision that began it: 800 portraits printed as monumental 36 × 54-inch silk banners and brought together in a single space.
One portrait can move us.
Eight hundred, surrounding us, can make visible the enormous human impact of this disease in a way that statistics never can.
Until that monumental exhibition is realized, smaller exhibitions, artist talks, portrait sessions and community programs bring The Grace Project into museums, galleries, hospitals, cancer centers and communities throughout the United States.
More Than a Photograph
The Grace Project is not only about creating an image.
The experience of being photographed can itself become an act of reclamation.
Participants are invited to step outside the clinical gaze that has examined, measured, cut, reconstructed and treated their bodies and enter a space where they are regarded differently: as whole human beings worthy of beauty, tenderness and attention.
Afterward, each participant receives signed archival photographs from their session as a gift.
For many, holding that finished portrait in their hands becomes another part of the experience. The photograph becomes evidence of a moment when they allowed themselves to be seen differently.
Not as a patient.
Not as a diagnosis.
Not as a body that needs to be fixed.
But as themselves.
The Work Continues
Breast cancer does not end when treatment ends, and neither does The Grace Project.
Charise continues to photograph survivors and thrivers, people living with metastatic breast cancer, veterans and active-duty service members, people who have chosen aesthetic flat closure, and others whose experiences broaden our understanding of what life with and after cancer actually looks like.
Some participants are photographed in celebration. Some in uncertainty. Some while living with incurable disease. Some have since died.
Every portrait becomes part of a collective history.
Together, these images say:
I was here.
This is my body.
This is what I carried.
See me.
Help Carry The Grace Project Forward
The Grace Project is created and sustained through the generosity of people who believe these bodies and stories deserve to be seen.
Support makes it possible to photograph participants regardless of their ability to pay, provide archival photographs to every person photographed, travel to communities where this work is needed, produce exhibitions and public programs, preserve this growing archive, and move closer to realizing the monumental 800-banner exhibition.
There are many ways to become part of this work: through a donation, sponsorship, partnership, exhibition opportunity, in-kind support, or simply by sharing The Grace Project with someone who needs to know it exists.
When you support The Grace Project, you help make sure these bodies are not hidden and these stories are not forgotten.
The Grace Project is a program of Grace Goddess Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Contributions are tax deductible to the extent permitted by law.
Grace Goddess Inc. EIN: 84-3572037
In the Press
Ellyn Ruddick, BUST Magazine:
“For her project ‘Grace,’ the photographer Isis draws her inspiration from ancient Hellenistic works of art, creating portraits of survivors of mastectomies with the majesty and beauty of the ancient Greek goddesses. Like sculptural relics that have survived the ages, the women are seen with the utmost reverence; the bodily marks of their strife become signs of their timeless courage.”
“Within the safe space of Isis’s careful lens, the women bloom like the flowers that surround them, letting the sun color and warm their resilient bodies. In the place of the Hellenistic marble and stone, they are draped with luscious fabric, full of movement and vitality. One woman stands before a seashell fountain like Botticelli’s Venus. Warrior-like, a survivor holds a plaster cast of breasts to her chest like a shield; others lean on one another for support. Yet another rests in a cocoon of grey fabric, as if ready to emerge and spread her wings. Like living sculptures, their eyes to the sky, these women rise victorious and radiant.”
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