Bruna Stude was born and raised in the port town of Split on the Dalmatian Coast in the 1960s, she was given her first 35 mm camera at age of ten.

She graduated from the Law University in Split, Croatia. She left Croatia in 1987 to pursue a life at sea.

Forsaking the comfort of her native environs and language, she found that photography gave her a new identity as a participant in the life and rhythms of the sea and a way to express her own creative sense and impulses.

Over the years, she circumnavigated the globe several times, pausing sometimes for months in remote areas, accessible only by water. Those voyages enabled her to explore the ocean as a subject with much appreciation and understanding.

Stude is best known for her large black-and-white underwater photographs and installations - at first of marine species and later of seascapes deprived of life.

Her current work results from her interest in the conceptual question of “presence of absence” in relation to the use of light within a photograph and “the tension between that which is and that which is not disrupts our assumptions about photographic narrative and representation.” She lives on the island of Kauai`i where she maintains a photographic print studio and art gallery. She has exhibited in Hawai`i state wide, nationally and internationally.


I spent most of my life at sea, my earliest memories are of water. For over two decades I photographed marine life. Today, when I photograph in the ocean, I often find void and damage instead, footprints where we humans shouldn't have left any.

That is why I photograph empty oceans.

- Bruna Stude