My work lives somewhere between memory and cinema.

Elizabeth Pelegrin is a fine-art photographer working under the name Fleur de Lisa, based in Norfolk, England.

Born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida, she developed a love of photography in childhood, when her father would take her on outings devoted entirely to taking pictures. He taught her to use his vintage manual-focus Canon film camera, and together they would linger in local camera shops, admiring cameras both new and old.

Film and processing were expensive for a young teenager in the 1990s, so her creativity found expression through other forms of art. It would be years before she returned to the camera with serious artistic intent, but the way of seeing her father encouraged never left her.

Her visual instincts were later sharpened somewhere unexpected: through years spent behind the scenes in theatre, and live production, working in costume design, stage technology, and event coordination while helping shape the visual worlds of other people's stories. In the early 2000s, her work running tech and facilitating improvisational theater and workshops taught her something specific: how to recognise a genuine, unscripted moment the second it happens, and how rarely anything staged comes close.

That chapter closed, and for several years there was little room left for creative work. In 2009, she moved to England with her husband and son. When she picked up a camera again, it was with a vision entirely her own.

Her photographs of people, animals, and places are rich in colour, with a touch of vintage grit and an old-world atmosphere, as if the place remembers something you don’t. She grew up on cinema, old paintings, and storybooks; that is simply how she has always seen things. She cannot help but photograph an expressive face, a laugh no one saw coming, a dramatic sky, weathered stone, stained glass, or a door that makes her wonder what lies behind it.

History has always been a love of hers, and photography gives her another way to tell stories through it. She is drawn to the feeling beneath the surface of a scene. Sometimes it is already there, waiting to be noticed; sometimes she must build it from nothing.

That same thread runs through her other work: a series of historical novels set in ancient Rome and a second original screenplay currently in development. Whether working through photographs or words, she returns to the same elements: history, atmosphere, character, and the feeling of falling completely into another time or place.

She currently lives in Diss with her two children and two cats.