Groundbreaking American artist and MacArthur Fellow Dawoud Bey examines the Black past and present. His photographs and film installations have been exhibited widely in museums and galleries throughout the United States and Europe. Bey’s work has been the subject of numerous major solo museum exhibitions and retrospectives, including Dawoud Bey: An American Project organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2020-2022), and Elegy at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (2023-2024) and New Orleans Museum of Art (2025-2026); and Dawoud Bey: Street Portraits at the Denver Art Museum (2024-2025).
His work has been the subject of several monographs, including a forty-year retrospective monograph Seeing Deeply (University of Texas Press, 2017), and the recent Street Portraits (MACK Books, 2021). His critical writings on contemporary art and photography have appeared in a range of publications. A major publication, Elegy (Aperture/VMFA, 2023), brings together the history projects and landscape-based work Bey has made since 2012 and accompanied the exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
Dawoud 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. He is represented by Sean Kelly Gallery, NY and LA, Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago, and Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco.