Dan Yeo is a photographer, and the Creative Director and co-founder of White Room Studio, a natural light portrait studio at 219 River Valley Road in Singapore. He studied at NAFA and founded his own studio, Nomads’ Studio at Sultan Gate, in 2007. In 2009 he started White Room Studio with his sister Elaine Lim, and he has trained most of the photographers who have worked there since.
His own work is in portraiture of dancers, where the moving body and the stillness of a photograph meet. Across seventeen years he has photographed families, maternity, couples, pets and corporate sessions, and he teaches art and sculpture to children in Singapore through the Singapore Arts Community. He was a climate ambassador on the 2025 Arctic expedition, working as photographer and videographer, and is a contributing photographer in The Remains of the Arctic.
White Room Studio has photographed more than 19,000 sessions since 2009 and has been named Tatler’s Best Portrait Photographer for nine consecutive years, 2017 to 2025.
What does a Creative Director do at a portrait studio?
I trained most of the photographers who work here, and I still see the work before it leaves. Every session, every retouched file, every album. Somebody has to say when something is not good enough, and that is my job. It is not a popular one, but standards drift quietly if nobody holds them.
What do you look for when you hire a photographer?
Whether they can be quiet. Technical skill I can teach. What I cannot teach is the instinct to wait, to not fill a silence, to notice the second a family relaxes and already be ready for it.
What makes a family portrait worth keeping?
Family portraits capture authentic moments about you and your family, and the love and connection you have to one another. Most photographs are of a moment. The ones that stay on a wall are of a relationship, and you can usually tell within a few frames whether a session is heading there.
Is there a session you still think about?
A family came back in 2019 and we recreated a portrait I had taken of them in 2012, with them holding up the old one in the new one. I photographed both. Seeing seven years of a family in a single frame, and knowing I was there for both ends of it, is about as good as this job gets.
What have you learned in seventeen years?
That people do not realise how much these pictures come to matter. Families ring me years after a shoot asking for images of someone they have lost. That was not something I understood when we started. It is why I am still particular about the work.
Read more on Dan Yeo on improving lives with family portraits.
Exhibitions
2015 · Zentai, Japan Creative Centre, Embassy of Japan, Singapore
2026 · Melting Ice, Sinking Cities: The Arctic Impact, CDL Green Gallery, Singapore Botanic Gardens. Presented by CDL with the National Parks Board and Ocean Geographic
Publications
2026 · The Remains of the Arctic, author Michael Aw. Contributing photographer. Foreword by Dr Sylvia Earle
Expeditions
2025 · Bears, Ice, Glaciers Arctic Climate Expedition, led by Dr Sylvia Earle
