Deborah Willis
Deborah Willis, Ph.D, is University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and has an affiliated appointment with the College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Social & Cultural, Africana Studies, where she teaches courses on Photography & Imaging, iconicity, and cultural histories visualizing the black body, women, and gender. She is also the director of the NYU Institute for African American Affairs and the Center for Black Visual Culture. Her research examines photography’s multifaceted histories, visual culture, the photographic history of Slavery and Emancipation; contemporary women photographers and beauty.
She received 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 has pursued a dual professional career as an art photographer and as one of the nation’s leading historians of African American photography and curator of African American culture.
Willis is the author of Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present; Out [o] Fashion Photography: Embracing Beauty; Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers – 1840 to the Present; Let Your Motto be Resistance – African American Portraits; Family History Memory: Photographs by Deborah Willis; VANDERZEE: The Portraits of James VanDerZee; and co-author of The Black Female Body A Photographic History with Carla Williams; Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery with Barbara Krauthamer; and Michelle Obama: The First Lady in Photographs (both titles a NAACP Image Award Winner). She lectures widely and has authored many papers and articles on a range of subjects including The Image of the Black in Western Art, Gordon Parks Life Works, Steidl, Volume II; America’s Lens in Double Exposure: Through the African American Lens; “Photographing Between the Lines: Beauty, Politics and the Poetic Vision of Carrie Mae Weems,” in Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography & Video, and “Malick Sidibé: The Front of the Back View” in Self: Portraiture and Social Identity. Professor Willis is editor of Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography; and Black Venus 2010: They Called Her “Hottentot”, which received the Susan Koppelman Award for the Best Edited Volume in Women’s Studies by the Popular Culture/American Culture Association in 2011.
Exhibitions of her art work include: A Sense of Place, Frick, University of Pittsburgh; Regarding Beauty, University of Wisconsin, Interventions in Printmaking: Three Generations of African-American Women, Allentown Museum of Art; A Family Affair, University of South Florida; I am Going to Eatonville, Zora Neale Hurston Museum; Afrique: See you, see me; Progeny: Deborah Willis +Hank Willis Thomas. Gantt Center.
Professor Willis’s curated exhibitions include: “Convergence”, Joan Mitchell Center, New Orleans; “Out [o] Fashion Photography: Embracing Beauty,” Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, “Visualizing Emancipation,” Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, “Gordon Parks: 100 Moments,” Schomburg Center; “Posing Beauty Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits” at the International Center of Photography and, “Social in Practice: The Art of Collaboration”, Nathan Cummings Foundation.
In addition to making art, writing and teaching, she has served as a consultant to museums, archives, and educational centers. She has appeared and consulted on media projects including the documentary films such as Through A Lens Darkly, Question Bridge: Black Males, a transmedia project, which received the ICP Infinity Award 2015, and American Photography, PBS Documentary. Since 2006 she has co-organized thematic conferences exploring imaging the black body in the West. Professor Willis has been elected to the board of the Society for Photographic Education, where she was Chair of the Board and received the Honored Educator Award in 2012 and the College Art Association. She holds honorary degrees from Pratt Institute and the Maryland Institute, College of Art. She is currently researching a book on an early 20th century portraitist and educator.
Ellyn Toscano
Ellyn Toscano is New York University’s Senior Director for Programming, Partnerships and Community Engagement in Brooklyn. In this position, she is charged with fostering programming partnerships at the intersection of technology, new media and the arts, and establishing new programming and strategic partnerships with Brooklyn’s civic, cultural, business and educational communities.
Before assuming these duties, Toscano was Executive Director of New York University Florence: Director of Villa La Pietra, a 15th century villa and historic garden that houses a collection of six thousand objects dating from the Etruscans to the 20th century, and the founder and Producer of The Season, a summer festival that assembles artists, writers, musicians and public intellectuals to produce new works or reinterpretations of classics in the Villa’s Renaissance revival gardens. She founded and directed La Pietra Dialogues, a year-long series of conferences, talks and exhibitions on a wide array of cultural and political topics. She is the co-editor of Women and Migration: Responses in Art and History, a volume that resulted from a conference on Women and Migrations, organized in Florence in 2016.
Before arriving at New York University Florence, Ms. Toscano served as Chief of Staff and Counsel to Congressman Jose Serrano of New York for two decades, was his chief policy advisor on legislative, political and media concerns and directed his work on the Appropriations Committee. Ms. Toscano also served as Counsel to the New York State Assembly Committee on Education for nine years. A lawyer by training, she earned an LLM in International Law from New York University School of Law.
Toscano serves as a commissioner of the New York City’s Commission on Gender Equity, a member of the boards of the National Parks of Harbor Conservancy of NY and Friends of FAI (Fondo Ambiente Italiano), an Advisory Board member of both the John Brademas Center and Civitella Ranieri Foundation and served on the boards of the Bronx Museum of the Arts and the Brooklyn Academy of Music (as the representative of the Brooklyn Borough President).
Cheryl Finley
Cheryl Finley is the Inaugural Director of the Atlanta University Center Art History + Curatorial Studies Collective and Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of Art & Visual Culture at Spelman College. She holds a Ph.D. in African American Studies and History of Art from Yale University. With nearly 20 years of award winning research on historic and contemporary images of the transatlantic slave trade, her seminal study, Committed to Memory: the Art of the Slave Ship Icon, is now available from Princeton University. This monograph is the first in depth study of the most famous image associated with the memory of slavery, a schematic engraving of a packed slave ship hold, and the art, architecture, poetry and film it has inspired since its creation in Britain in 1788. Another of Dr. Finley’s works also published this year, My Soul Has Grown Deep: Black Art from the American South (Yale University Press, 2018), accompanies the exhibition History Refused to Die: Highlights from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York through September 23, 2018.
An art historian, curator and contemporary art critic, Dr. Finley has contributed essays and reviews to Aperture, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, American Quarterly and Art Forum. Her prolific critical attention to photography has produced the coauthored publications Teenie Harris, Photographer: An American Story (Carnegie Museum of Art, 2011), Harlem: A Century in Images (Skira Rizzoli, 2010), Diaspora, Memory, Place: David Hammons, Maria Magdalena Campos- Pons, Pamela Z (Prestel, 2008), and numerous catalog essays and journal articles on artists such as Lorna Simpson, Hank Willis Thomas, Walker Evans, Joy Gregory, Carrie Mae Weems, Roshini Kempadoo, Deborah Willis and Berenice Abbott.
As a curator of contemporary African diaspora art, photography and performance, Dr. Finley contributed the multimedia installation African Diaspora Room to the inaugural exhibition of the August Wilson Center in Pittsburgh in 2010 and co-curated 3×3: Three Artists/Three Projects, David Hammons, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Pamela Z for the 2004 Dak’Art Biennial of Contemporary African Art in Dakar, Senegal with History of Art Department colleague Dr. Salah Hassan. Dr. Finley is also the curator of Renderings: New Narratives and Reinterpretations, a nationally touring exhibition celebrating 40 Years of printmaking from the Brandywine Workshop in Philadelphia (2014) and the photography exhibition celebrating the 50th anniversary of Ghana’s independence, Re-dedicate: Ghana@ 50! at the W.E.B. Du Bois Center, Accra (2007).
A specialist in the art market, Dr. Finley’s current research includes the interdisciplinary project, Black Market: Inside the Art World, which examines the global art economy, focusing on the relationship among artists, museums, biennials and tourism. She regularly offers the popular online course, the Art Market, which teaches the chronological history of the art market beginning with the Renaissance patronage model of the Medici’s in Italy and ending with close readings of the contemporary art market from prominent dealers, museums, art fairs and biennales.
Dr. Finley is completing a monograph on the artist Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons as part of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center’s A VER: Revisioning Art History series. Funded by a two-year American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) collaborative faculty grant, she is finishing a collaborative project on the contemporary migration crisis in the Mediterranean and at the US/Mexico Border, Visualizing Travel, Gendering Diaspora, with colleagues Leigh Raiford (UC Berkeley) and Heike Raphael- Hernandez (U. Wurtzburg). Dr. Finley’s research has been supported by the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University; the Ford Foundation; the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art (CASVA); and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, among others. She is currently a Research Associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture (VIAD/FADA), University of Johannesburg, South Africa.
