Deborah Willis
Visiting Professor of African and African American Studies (New York University) (spring term 2006 only)
Address:
Harvard University
Department of African and African American Studies
12 Quincy St.
Cambridge, MA 02138
Courses
African and African American Studies 167x. Body and the Lens (New Course)
Biography
Deborah Willis was a 2001 MacArthur Fellow and a 1996 recipient of the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation award. She has pursued a dual professional career as an art photographer and as one of the nation's leading historians of African American photography and curator of African American culture. Exhibitions of her work include: Regarding Beauty, University of Wisconsin 2003; Embracing Eatonville, Light Works, Syracuse, NY 2003-2004; HairStories, Scottsdale Contemporary Art Museum, Scottsdale, AZ 2003-2004; The Comforts of Home, Hand Workshop Art Center, Richmond, VA, 1999; Re/Righting History: Counternarratives by Contemporary African-American Artists, Katonah Museum of Art, 1999; Memorable Histories and Historic Memories, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 1998; Cultural Baggage, Rice University, Houston, TX, 1995. Curated Exhibitions include: Imagining Families--Images and Voices and Reflections in Black. Notable projects include The Black Female Body A Photographic History (with Carla Williams), Temple University Press, Philidephia, 2002; and A Small Nation of People: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Photographs from the Paris Exposition, Amistad Press, 2003; Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers - 1840 to the Present, New York: W.W. Norton; Visual Journal: Photography in Harlem and DC in the Thirties and Forties, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC, 1996; Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography, The New Press, New York, NY, 1994; and VANDERZEE: The Portraits of James VanDerZee, Harry Abrams Publishing, New York, NY, 1993.