Stephen Marc is a storyteller, a modern griot who uses photography to construct thematic mélanges of metaphor and memory. A recognized pioneer in digital photography, Marc is highly skilled in the art of montage. His two most recent series, Soul Searching and Passage on the Underground Railroad, weave more than 500 years of African American history and culture into a digital quilt made up of family snapshots, photographs of historical locations, and his own self-portraits.

Marc received his BFA from Pomona College, and his MFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. He was awarded the Jim and Betty Kasson Award from the Center for Photographic Art in 2004, the Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellowship in 1996, the Visual Arts Fellowship in Photography from Arts Midwest (NEA), and was a three-time recipient of the Illinois Arts Council Fellowship. He has been an Artist in Residence at CEPA, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, and Lycoming College in Pennsylvania.

His work has been published in two monographs, Urban Notions and The Black Trans-Atlantic Experience, and has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including shows at the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Field Museum of Natural History in Houston, FotoFest, Harvard University, the Mississippi Museum of Art, and the traveling Smithsonian exhibition and book, Reflections in Black.

Marc’s work is featured in public, private, and corporate collections in both the US and abroad, including the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Princeton University, and the Sprint Corporation. A frequent lecturer, he served on the National Advisory Board of the Society for Photographic Education for four years. Marc taught at Columbia College in Chicago for more than twenty years, and currently teaches at Arizona State University.