Deborah Willis

Art Style: Documentary photography
Media: Photography, Filmmaking
Awards: Guggenheim Fellowship, Fletcher Fellowship, MacArthur Fellowship, ICP Infinity Award for Writing

Deborah Willis was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1948. Having noted the lack of visibility of black photographers, she decided to investigate and recover the legacy of African-American photography. She has curated a variety of major exhibitions including Reflections in Black (2000) at the Smithsonian, and later produced a documentary film Through a Lens (2014) based on the book from the aforementioned exhibition. She has also developed her own body of work, focusing on identity and self-image. In Framing Beauty (2013), she examined the role of the beauty industry in the construction of African-Americans image, identity, and history.

Carrie Mae Weems

Art Style: Documentary photography, Conceptual photography
Media: Photography, Collage, Filmmaking, Video installation
Awards: Inga Maren Otto Fellowship, MacArthur Fellowship, Rome Prize Fellowship, Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant

Carrie Mae Weems was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1953. Initially interested in photography for political purposes, she gradually moved from documentary to conceptual photography. In her first series called Family Pictures and Stories (1983), she used her family to explore the migration of black families from the South to the North of the country. She also examines issues of race, gender, and identity in other works including American Icons (1989) and Kitchen Table (1990). She has expressed disbelief and concern about the exclusion of images of black women from the popular media, and aims to represent these excluded subjects and speak to their experience through her work.

Lorna Simpson

Art Style: Conceptual photography
Media: Photography, Collage, Filmmaking, Video installation
Awards: Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, Whitney Museum of American Art Award, ICP Infinity Award in Art

Lorna Simpson is born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1960. She is best known for her large-scale works that combined text fragments and studio photographs of anonymous African-American women draped in white dresses. In Necklines and Guarded Conditions (both 1989), the photographs anchored with obliquely disturbing text, addresses issues of sexuality, discrimination, and violence. Simpson has also experimented with film as well as continuing to work with photography. She has taken up investigations of race and glamour in her photographs, featuring African-American models in classic Hollywood poses.

Xaviera Simmons

Art Style: Conceptual art
Media: Photography, Performance, Installation
Awards: Art Matters Fellowship, David C. Driskell Prize, Emergency Grant

Xaviera Simmons was born in New York City, New York, in 1974. She developed a cyclical studio practice, which is an ongoing investigation of sensory experience, memory, and mythology. In doing so, she is examining different artistic modes including photography, performance, and installation. She is also interested in the myriad ways that language, landscape, and portraiture construct identity. In Number 14 (2012), Simmons produced a photographic series documenting her performance aboard a train in Sri Lanka, which displayed how cultural difference can be bridged through empathy and collective action.

LaToya Ruby Frazier

Art Style: Self-portraiture, Social documentary
Media: Photography
Awards: MacArthur Fellowship, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, Theo Westenberger Award

LaToya Ruby Frazier is born in Braddock, Pennsylvania, in 1982. She explores identities of place, race, and family in photographic work that is a hybrid of self-portraiture and social narrative. Her six-year project The Notion of Family (2008) uses black and white photography and video to document and explore the African-American family experience. She uses her own family as her subject, focusing on relationships between herself, her mother, and her grandmother. She has also documented other contemporary issues such as the Flint Water Crisis.