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Author, Photographer, Professor of Photography and Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, former Curator of Exhibitions at the Smithsonian's Center for African American History and Culture.

Deborah Willis' books include Reflections In Black, BLACK: A Celebration of Culture, The Black Female Body and others. Her awards and fellowships include a MacArthur "genius" Fellowship, The International Center for Photography Infinity Award for Writing in Photography and The Golden Light Photography Book of the Year.

The Programs

Reflections in Black
A lecture/slide program

A monumental collection of photographs of African American life, REFLECTIONS IN BLACK: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present is the first ever comprehensive history of African American photographers, REFLECTIONS IN BLACK is a triumphant celebration of family, endurance, spirituality, and the diverse range of black experience over the last two centuries, overturning many common ideas about black life, and through its sheer power rewriting American history itself.

Deborah Willis presents rich, poignant glimpses of African American life from slavery to the Great Migrations of the 1920s, from rare antebellum daguerreotypes to the Harlem Renaissance, from the Civil Rights era to the postmodern art photography of the 1990s. The exhibit "Reflections in Black" opened at the Smithsonian Institution in 2000 and traveled the country for three years.

Black: A Celebration of Culture
A lecture/slide program

Black: A Celebration of a Culture looks at the way in which culture is constructed through photographs. Photographing friends, people and places, family members, and their possessions is a transformative act that one hopes instills a sense of joy and dignity in the subject, photographer, and viewer. Since the beginning of photography, individual portraits, family photographs, and community events have embodied that special connection, and they can be viewed as evidence of special moments and used to illustrate a story.

"Themes explored include everyday life-family life, spirituality, celebrations, portraiture, beauty, memory, and the arts. We are all familiar with images of the struggle for equal rights in America, which document an important aspect of the American experience, but I wondered about the photographs that show how photographers recorded what people do on Saturday night and Sunday morning, and the ways in which we all commemorate family or cultural events."

The Black Female Body
A lecture/slide program

The Black Female Body offers a stunning array of familiar and many virtually unknown photographs, showing how photographs reflected and reinforced Western culture's fascination with black women's bodies.

In the nineteenth century, black women were rarely subjects for artistic studies but posed before the camera again and again as objects for social scientific investigation and as exotic representatives of faraway lands. South Africans, Nubians, enslaved Abyssinians and Americans, often partially or completely naked and devoid of identity, were displayed for the armchair anthropologist or prurient viewer. Willis and Williams relate these social science photographs and the blatantly pornographic images of this era with those of black women as domestics and as nursemaids for white children in family portraits. As seen through the camera lens, Jezebel and Mammy took the form of real women made available to serve white society.

Here are nineteenth century portraits of well-dressed and beautifully coifed creoles of color and artistic studies of dignified black women. Here are Harlem Renaissance photographs of entertainer Josephine Baker and writer Zora Neale Hurston. Documenting the long struggle for black civil rights, the presentation includes draw on politically pointed images by noted photographers and also features the work of contemporary artists who photograph black women asserting their subjectivity, reclaiming their bodies, and refusing the representations of the past.