Art Fact Friday #22 Deborah Willis

William Mandela Matthews
Dec 22, 2023
2 min read

An artist, author and curator pioneering research focused on cultural histories. With a multifaceted professional career as an art photographer, a teacher of photography and cultural history, renowned as of the nation’s leading historians of African American photography, and a curator of African diasporic cultures. The artiste magnifies the black body, women and gender. Admired for photographer, recognized historian, as well as MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellow, and University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Also an affiliated appointment with the College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Social & Cultural Analysis, Africana Studies,

Deborah Willis, was born February 5, 1948. Between 1980 and 1992, Willis served as a curator at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library . She created her first book in 1985 “Black Photographers, 1840-1940: an Illustrated Bio-bibliography”. 1989, Willis followed up “An Illustrated Bio-Bibliography of Black Photographers, 1940-1988”. Her goal being to praise black photographers. She went on to work for the Center for African American History and Culture of the Smithsonian Institution.

From 2000 and 2001 Willis, acted as Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professor in Documentary Studies and American Studies at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Later she worked as a professor of photography and imaging in the Tisch School of Arts, New York University. 2002, Among them are Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present, was published. In 2006 she began co-organizing conferences titled Black Portraiture. The conferences explore imaging the black body in the West; later hosted in Johannesburg, 2016.

In 2008, Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits for the National Museum of African American History and Culture of the Smithsonian Institution exhibition opened.

In 2009 Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present was published. Later Black: A Celebration of a Culture released, 2014. The Willis received the NAACP Image Award. Followed by Through A Lens Darkly and Question Bridge: Black Males, a transmedia project, receiving an ICP Infinity Award, 2015. Willis was included in We Speak: Black Artists in Philadelphia, 1920s-1970s at the Woodmere Art Museum. In 2019 she was the Robert Mapplethorpe Photographer in Residence of the American Academy in Rome. Recently, 2022 she was awarded the Don Tyson Prize for the Advancement of American Art by the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.