As a visual storyteller, Deborah Willis calls us to witness, remember, and recollect. Her photographs embody collective memory and narrative. In Shotgun Houses, the long-abandoned, neglected buildings serve as narrative of an era past. Place, home, refuge, it is apparent—even in their disrepair—that these houses once represented more than simply shelter for the free blacks who lived in them, and Willis then gives them voice—Gloria was know for her catfish at the juke joint; Mary used to bake peach cobbler every saturday; Ruth’s press’n curl was the talk of the town.

Memory, history, and representation are the cornerstones of Willis’ work. The view from the pulpit is plainly that and more, the open bible signifying the role of faith and the church in the black experience; the red, polished nails of the female body builder, juxtaposed against her muscular, veiny thighs, challenging our notions of beauty and gender.

For more than thirty years, Willis has pursued a dual career as a fine art photographer and as one of the nation’s leading historians and curators. As an essayist and scholar, she has explored the role of photography and its impact on our culture—in particular the role of the black image—and the extensive contributions made by African Americans photographers throughout the history of the medium.

Named a Guggenheim Fellow and an Alphonse Fletcher Fellow last year, she was also awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2000. She curated the landmark Smithsonian exhibition, Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present. It was the largest exhibition ever conceived to explore the breadth and history of black photography in the U.S.; the survey featured more than 300 vintage, modern, and contemporary images by photographers of African descent.

Willis received a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from George Mason University, an MA in Art History from CUNY, an MFA from Pratt University, and BA in Photography from the Philadelphia College of Art. She has been awarded grants from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has been a Visiting Artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia College, Light Works, and the Rhode Island School of Design.

Willis is currently professor of Photography and Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. A noted writer, she authored Family History Memory: Recording African-American Life, The Black Female Body: A Photographic History, with Carla Williams, A Small Nation of People: W. E.B. DuBois and African American Portraits of Progress, and the companion catalogue to the Reflections in Black exhibition. Yet it is her first two books, An Illustrated Bio-Bibliography of Black Photographers: 1840-1940, and An Illustrated Bio-Bibliography of Black Photographers: 1940-1988, which garnered her early acclaim and that stand as the most exhaustive compendiums of biographical and bibliographic information on black photographers.

Willis’ work is featured in public, private, and corporate collections including the Center for Creative Photography, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Benton Museum of Art, Duke University, and the University of Alabama. She has exhibited throughout the U.S. and abroad, including the Smithsonian Institute, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Kempner Museum of Art, the Light Factory, and the Texas Woman’s University.