Groundbreaking artist and MacArthur Fellow Dawoud Bey examines the Black past and present. His photographs and films have been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions all over the world, including Elegy at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (2023–2024) and the New Orleans Museum of Art (2025–2026); Street Portraits at the Denver Art Museum (2024–2025); and An American Project, which was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2020–2022). He has been the subject of several monographs, including Elegy (Aperture/VMFA, 2023), a major publication documenting his landscape retrospective at VMFA. Bey’s upcoming projects include an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario (2026) and participation in the Berlin Prize Fellowship (2026) and the Triennial of Photography Hamburg (2026).
The recipient of numerous awards, including four honorary doctorates, Bey lives and works in Chicago and New York. He is a Critic and alumnus at Yale University and is Professor Emeritus at Columbia College Chicago.
Photo by Frank Ishman.