Aaron Cobbett moved to New York City in 1986. At his first job as a window dresser at Bergdorf Goodman, he learned styling, hair and make-up, set building and lighting.  

During this time he fell in love with photography, earning a BFA from The Tisch School of the Arts Photography Program at New York University in 1994.

In the mid 90’s, he became known for his stylized, color-saturated images of nightlife personas, transgender performers, drag queens, sex workers and porn stars.  Going on to shoot over 100 covers for HX Magazine, his images became an important and immediately recognizable part of the contemporary queer cultural canon.

His work has been shown in New York at The FIT Museum, The Leslie-Lohman Museum, The New York Historical Society, Debs & Co. Gallery , Envoy Enterprises, Wessel O'Connor Gallery, and The Louvre, Paris, among others. 

He’s had two monographs published: COBBETT in 2008 and Super Eros in 1999. 

His work in photography has been featured in Vanity Fair, Vogue, Glamour and Interview Magazines among others.

Creating costumes and fabricated sets has been the mainstay of his process from the beginning. In 2014 he shifted his focus towards textiles, developing techniques of rendering his images in fabric, eventually making lens based quilts.

For his textile practice, Cobbett has been awarded residencies at MASS MoCA, Instinct Berlin and Yaddo and shown at Village Berlin Gallery, the MCLA Berkshire Cultural Resource Center, North Adams, Massachusetts, and the Tisch Institute of Emerging Media in New York City.

Working in New York’s LGBTQ+ community,  Cobbett has represented queer and trans New Yorkers in mainstream and queer media since the mid 90’s. 

He currently lives and works in Brooklyn.