Deborah Willis (artist)

Deborah Willis (born February 5, 1948) is a contemporary African-American artist, photographer, curator of photography, photographic historian, author, and educator. Among other awards and honors she has received, she was a 2000 MacArthur Fellow. She is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at Tisch School of the Arts of New York University.

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Willis is the mother of Hank Willis Thomas. Her father was a photographer, and her close familial ties are apparent in certain works that seem related to family members or occasions, such as Daddy's Ties: The Tie Quilt II (1992).

Her degrees include a B.F.A. in photography from Philadelphia College of Art in 1975; an M.F.A. in photography from Pratt Institute in 1979; an M.A. in art history from City College of New York in 1986; and a Ph.D. from the Cultural Studies Program of George Mason University in 2001. She was the curator of photographs and the prints/exhibition coordinator at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library between 1980 and 1992, after which she became exhibitions curator at the Center for African American History and Culture of the Smithsonian Institution for eight years. Between 2000 and 2001 she was Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professor in Documentary Studies and American Studies at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She then joined the faculty of New York University. Interested in "historic and cultural documentation and preservation," she has published "some twenty books on African-American photographers and on the representation of blacks in photographic imagery." Among them are Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present (2002) and Black: A Celebration of a Culture (2014). Also known as "Deb Willis," she survived a diagnosis of breast cancer in 2001.

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