DALE MAY
NEW YORK ADVERTISING PHOTOGRAPHER, DIRECTOR, CGI & AI ARTIST
Dale May doesn't just make images. He builds worlds.
Dale's work has earned recognition from the most respected institutions in advertising and photography: Lürzer's Archive 200best Advertising Photographers 2025/26, Lürzer's Archive 200best Digital Artists 2024/25, Lürzer's Archive 200best Digital Artists 2022/23, 2024 International Photography Awards Special Photographer of the Year in the Digitally Enhanced category, Communication Arts 64th Photography Annual Award of Excellence, Best Photography Awards 1st Place Gold in Professional Advertising Photography, Prix de la Photographie Paris PX3 Gold, ReFocus Awards Gold, International Color Awards 3rd Place Honor of Distinction, 2025 New York Shorts International Film Festival Official Selection, and Sundance Film Festival Official Selection 2003.
Full Award List
For over 30 years, Dale has been one of New York's most distinctive voices in advertising photography, commercial direction, and photorealistic CGI production. His work is defined by a single driving principle: that the most powerful campaigns begin with a strong portrait and end with a complete cinematic world built around it. Everything in between, the CGI environments, the VFX, the animation, the AI integration, and the post-production, exists in service of that story.
Known for his highly stylized, conceptual approach, Dale has photographed a wide range of talent including Daniel Day-Lewis, Charlize Theron, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Elizabeth Banks. His work has helped define campaigns for Oprah Daily, Sony, Warner Brothers, Puma, Speed Stick, Anheuser-Busch, Jägermeister, Tsingtao, StriVectin, Lumineux, Shingrix, Voranigo, Intellia Therapeutics, Camcevi, Genentech, and EDIMS, spanning pharmaceutical, healthcare, consumer goods, entertainment, music, and technology.
FULL-SPECTRUM VISUAL ARTIST. EVERY LAYER. ONE SIGNATURE.
Today's advertising campaigns demand photography, video, CGI, VFX, animation, AI integration, and complex post-production, traditionally sourced from multiple vendors across multiple departments. Dale handles all of it under one roof, under one creative vision, from concept through final delivery.
That unified approach isn't just efficient. It's a creative advantage. When the photographer is also the director, the CGI artist, the AI specialist, and the post-production supervisor, nothing gets lost in translation between departments. The vision that exists at the start of a campaign is the vision that gets delivered at the end.
For agencies and brand partners, that means fewer handoffs, faster production, tighter creative control, and campaigns that hold together visually across every platform and format.
THE WORK
Dale's hybrid methodology combines studio photography with custom-built photorealistic CGI environments, AI-assisted workflows, and integrated motion production. The result is a body of work that moves fluidly between still campaigns, broadcast and digital video, and short-form narrative film, always anchored by the portrait at its center.
His personal projects function as proof of concept for what the hybrid method makes possible. The Starlight Falls Motel, a fully realized CGI location designed and built from scratch, has produced an award-winning still photography series and a festival-screened short film, both created entirely in a home studio with no location fees, no weather dependencies, and no production compromises. 1974 paired a studio portrait shot three years earlier with a fully CGI-built 1970s Americana town, earning five international awards including Communication Arts 64th Photography Annual Award of Excellence. Live Free Or Die placed an actor on a custom CGI chopper alongside a CGI piglet sidekick, winning IPA Silver and Best Photography Awards Gold. The Drama Queen series placed a model in a five-scene Old Hollywood cinematic narrative built entirely in 3D. The Horse Whisperer put a first-time rider on horseback across a Montana landscape that existed only in CGI, in the middle of a Connecticut winter.
These are not experiments. They are demonstrations of a production system that works at every budget level, for every kind of campaign.
That same hybrid methodology powers Dale's pharmaceutical and healthcare campaign work spanning oncology, vaccines, gene therapy, and healthcare technology. The Camcevi HCP campaign for Accord BioPharma, recently featured in Workbook, applied the same single-artist approach to a national pharma launch, combining live patient and physician portraits with photorealistic CGI environments and cinemagraph animation.
BEYOND THE LENS
Dale holds a BFA in Photography from Parsons School of Design. His sensibility as a director and image-maker is shaped as much by his love of cinema and horror film as by his commercial work. He is the writer and director of Jer-Z Knights, his 2003 Sundance Film Festival short, and the founder and member of the band Satanicide. That combination of cinematic thinking, humor, and genuine creative obsession is visible in everything he makes. View on IMDb.
WORKING WITH DALE
Dale collaborates directly with creative directors, art directors, agency producers, brand marketing teams, design firms, video production companies and independent clients. Whether the brief calls for a single campaign image or a fully integrated still and motion production, the process is the same: one clear creative vision, built together, delivered without compromise.
To discuss your next project, get in touch.
To understand how the hybrid photography and CGI production process works from brief to delivery, read the Process & How It Works article.
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