Part storyteller, folklorist, and image-maker, the contemporary artist Carrie Mae Weems has defied simple explanation for more than twenty years. Throughout her career, making use of conceptual photography, sculpture, sound, and video, Weems has integrated text with the visual image to document and challenge perceptions of race, class, and gender. And while she typically uses black subjects in her work, her images are meant to represent people of all ethnicities.

Weems received her BFA from the California Institute of the Arts, an MFA from the University of California, San Diego, and studied folklore at the University of California, Berkeley.  She is the recipient of the 2005/2006 Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize Fellowship, and was awarded the Pollack Krasner Foundation Grant in Photography and the Visual Arts Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.  Weems has also been an Artist-in-Residence at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Rhode Island School of Design.

Her work is included in both public and private collections, including the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.  Weems' work has been represented at DAK’ART, the Biennale of Contemporary Art in Dakar, Senegal, and the Johannesburg Biennale in Johannesburg, South Africa.

She has also exhibited throughout the United States and internationally for more than twenty years. Weems has had solo and group shows at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Newcomb Art Gallery at Tulane University, the International Center of Photography, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, the Walker Art Center, and the Whitney Museum.