Dr. Deborah Willis

Deborah Willis, PhD is University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at Tisch School of the Arts. She has affiliated appointments with the College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Social & Cultural Analysis, and the Institute of Fine Arts, where she teaches courses on photography & 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, among others. Dr. Willis’s curated exhibitions include Framing Moments: Photography from the Kalamazoo Institute of the Arts, Free as They Want to be: Artists Committed to Memory with FotoFocus, and Reflections in Black 25th Anniversary Edition: A Reframing.‍

Dr. Willis was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and was a Richard D. Cohen Fellow in African and African American Art, 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 & Sciences. She is a recipient of the Don Tyson Prize for the Advancement of American Art (2022); was named the Mary Lucille Dauray Artist-in-Residence by the Norton Museum of Art; and taught a Master Class titled Home, Reimagining Interiority at Anderson Ranch in 2023.