Gene Tolan is a photographer, visual strategist, educator, and artistic researcher based in New York. His work investigates beauty, masculinity, desire, and the cultural life of images, exploring how photographs, garments, and designed environments orchestrate the conditions under which perception, recognition, and belonging emerge.

He holds an MFA in Photography from Parsons School of Design and is currently completing the One-Year Certificate Program in Curatorial Practices in Photography at the International Center of Photography (ICP).

Working across fine art, commercial photography, curation, and research, Tolan brings artistic inquiry into dialogue with image-making.

ArtLab is Tolan's experimental research practice, where photographs, garments, film, and constructed environments become the means to investigate how aesthetic conditions shape perception, embodiment, desire, and social meaning.

Across this work, Tolan treats the body as an architecture through which beauty, desire, and visibility are composed; testing how light, gesture, and setting transform its capacity to shape experience.

Within ArtLab, Tolan founded CoffyGalerie, a platform for exhibitions, curatorial projects, publishing, and visual culture, and created COUTUREBOY®, a multidisciplinary practice exploring male beauty through photography, garments, and film.