David Teplica

David Teplica (born April 27, 1959 in Bellefonte, PA) is an American artist and plastic surgeon who is academically trained in both the arts and medicine, and actively works to bridge the two fields.
Early Life and Education
The son of a restoration architect and a registered nurse, David began fusing the interests and disciplines of both parents as a young child. Teplica learned to draw, sculpt, and photograph human form with his father’s encouragement, while his mother taught him anatomy and medicine.
After graduating from Bellefonte High School, Teplica was one of five students at Penn State University from the undergraduate class of 1981 who were given the privilege to design their own academic majors. He graduated with High Distinction after completing an interdisciplinary Visual and Anatomic Study of the Human System. Teplica began exhibiting his photographs of the human body while at Dartmouth Medical School in the 1980s, then went on to train in Plastic Surgery at the University of Chicago Medical Center. In the middle of surgical residency, during a two year research initiative with advisor and Nobel Laureate Charles Huggins, Teplica also earned the degree of Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He graduated in 1990 with a visual thesis on identical twin anatomy. Concurrently, he launched an international children’s burn prevention initiative using medical imagery as a tool to spark public awareness, following the lead of Lewis Hine. Teplica then completed plastic surgical training in 1992.
Dual career
Although David Teplica is best known for his creative and scientific studies of identical twin anatomy, several other projects have gained international attention. Today, Teplica maintains a focused private practice in plastic surgery in Chicago, IL. His photography has been widely reproduced, the images are exhibited worldwide, and his prints are held in many museum collections, including the , Portrait Gallery of Canada, Art Institute of Chicago , and the International Museum of Surgical Science, among many others. Corporate collections that have acquired work include the LaSalle Bank Photography Collection , J.P. Morgan Chase Collection , and the Polaroid Corporation. Teplica lectures widely, bases his research and teaching activities at the University of Chicago , and focuses his clinical private practice at Saint Joseph Hospital on Chicago’s north side.
Projects
Identical Twins
David Teplica became fascinated by twins as a child and soon developed an all-consuming obsession for them. His scientific and artistic careers burgeoned simultaneously, and over the years he created sequences of scientific images of twin anatomy that the Encyclopedia Britannica called "an unprecedented archive of clinical photographs." The creative black and white twin photographs have been exhibited widely throughout Europe and the United States, including shows at the Catherine Edelman Gallery (1991) and Stephen Daiter Gallery (1998) in Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago (1992, 1997), the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (1998) , the Wellcome Trust in London (1999) , the Teylers Museum in the Netherlands (2001), the Museum Dr. Guislain in Belgium (2003) , the Smart Museum at the University of Chicago (2002, 2003), the Palmer Museum of Art (2006), and at the 1st World Congress on Twin Pregnancies held in Venice in 2009. Teplica’s most widely known image, newborn twins embracing, became the cover of Wally Lamb’s bestselling novel—and Oprah’s Book Club Selection-- “I Know This Much Is True.”
In a 1995 article in The New Yorker, Lawrence Wright described the birth of the scientific component of the twin project #6. Teplica had gotten to know Dr. Louis Keith and his identical twin Donald. “At their urging, Dr. Teplica turned his hobby into a more formal project, and he has already compiled an archive of approximately six thousand twin portraits. Funding to produce the Twinsburg Archive came in 1989 with significant support from the Eastman Kodak Company, the National Institutes of Health Surgical Scientist Training Grant Program, and the Center for Study of Multiple Birth.
With the advent of digital image analysis software, and with technical insights from Kalev Peekna, Teplica created a digital subtraction photographic technique that accurately diagnoses the Mirror Phenomenon in monozygotic twins. Early data from the project shows that the environment plays little role in the development of human anatomy, since nearly 100% of all visible skin structures, as well as the general shape of both the face and body are concordant in mirror twins, but only when the opposite side of each twin is examined. Since the environment cannot selectively and consistently affect just the opposite sides of two individuals living in the same environment throughout their lifetimes, environment cannot be invoked as a cause for the development of secondary skin structures or the determinant of the shape of the face or body. This finding had not been previously described, and strongly suggests that all future studies of twin anatomy and genetic inheritance be done while controlling for mirroring in twin study subjects.
In addition, a study done in collaboration with the East Flanders Prospective Twin Survey in Ghent, Belgium showed that mirror twin anatomy correlates with laterality of handedness, but does not appear to be related to the timing of the embryologic split in the monozygotic twinning process. These findings suggest that mirroring may extend to all components of embryologic tissue, therefore affecting brain development and behavior, and that the twinning process may be genetically encoded, rather than result from intrauterine environmental factors.
Notable Portraits
Throughout his career, Teplica has taken photographic portraits of influential artists, medical collaborators, and social figures. Most of these images are now held in museum and institutional collections, including portraits of Nobel Laureate Charles Huggins, MD, Marshall Urist, MD, Paul Cadmus, George Tooker, Isabel Bishop, and Howard Dean.

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