Deborah Willis

Deborah Willis, PhD, is University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She has affiliated appointments with the College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, and the Institute of Fine Arts where she teaches courses on photography and imaging, iconicity, and cultural histories visualizing the Black body, women, and gender. She is the director of NYU’s Center for Black Visual Culture/Institute of African American Affairs. Her research examines photography’s multifaceted histories, visual culture, the photographic history of slavery and emancipation, contemporary women photographers, and beauty.

She is the author of The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship and Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present (NYU Press, 2021), among others. Dr. Willis’s curated exhibitions include: “Framing Moments in the KIA” Kalamazoo Institute of the Arts,” “Home: Reimagining Interiority,” YoungArts Gallery, and “Free as they want to be: Artists Committed to Memory,” FotoFocus.

Dr. Willis was awarded the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and was a Richard D. Cohen Fellow in African and African American Art, Hutchins Center, Harvard University; a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow; and an Alphonse Fletcher, Jr. Fellow. She was the Robert Mapplethorpe Photographer in Residence of the American Academy in Rome and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a recipient of the Don Tyson Prize for the Advancement of American Art by the Crystal Bridges Museum in 2022 and was named the Mary Lucille Dauray Artist-in-Residence by the Norton Museum of Art in 2023.