Groundbreaking American artist and MacArthur Fellow Dawoud Bey examines the Black past and present. His photographs and film installations engage the oft disappeared histories of the Black presence in America. Bey began his career as a photographer in 1975 with a series of photographs, “Harlem, U.S.A,” that were exhibited to critical acclaim in his first one-person exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. His work has since been the subject of numerous major museum and gallery exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe, with works held in numerous public collections.

He is a Critic and alumnus at Yale University and is Professor Emeritus at Columbia College, Chicago. In addition to his MacArthur Fellowship, Bey is a recipient of many awards and distinctions, including recognition by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2024), the College Art Association (2023), the ICP Infinity Award (2019), a Lifetime Achievement Award from Howard University (2017), the United States Artists Fellowship (2015), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2002), and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1991), among many other honors. He has been the recipient of four honorary doctorate degrees.

Dawoud Bey’s work has been included in important solo and group exhibitions worldwide and is included in the permanent collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, the High Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Tate Modern, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and other museums internationally. He is represented by Sean Kelly Gallery in New York, and Stephen Daiter Gallery in Chicago.