10: Professor Deb Willis

Deb Willis is an artist, photographer, author, and educator, and she is one of the nation's leading historians and curators of African American photography.  At NYU, she is a University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging in NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Willis is widely published; her most recent book is The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship (NYU Press, 2021).

In addition to making art, writing, and teaching, she has served as a consultant to museums, archives, and educational centers. She has also appeared and consulted on media projects, including documentary films such as Through A Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People; Question Bridge: Black Males, a transmedia project, which received the ICP Infinity Award 2015; and American Photography, a PBS Documentary. 

Since 2006, she has co-organized thematic conferences exploring “Black Portraitures,” focusing on imaging the Black body. She holds honorary degrees from Pratt Institute and the Maryland Institute, College of Art. She is currently researching two projects, on photography and the Black Arts Movement, and artists reimaging history.

In the reckoning with the still-pervasive racism within America, Willis’s work confronts and upends our comprehension of the past and expands our capacity to understand the current moment.

She is also a contributor to the forthcoming Are the Arts Essential?, an anthology of major American artists, scholars, and funders who contemplate this question, based on a multiyear series of symposia convened by the Brademas Center (NYU Press, February 2022).