Dawoud Bey is a photographer, artist, and educator based in Chicago and New York. He is Professor Emeritus of Art and a former Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago. Bey holds a BFA in photography from Empire State College and an MFA from Yale University School of Art. He began his career as a street photographer, making portraits of historically underrepresented subjects; this is evident in his first solo exhibition, Harlem, USA (1975-1979), at the Studio Museum in Harlem. At the heart of his art practice is a deep desire to connect and collaborate with the communities he photographs. Bey has pioneered programs that redefine how artists engage with institutions, while striving to make institutional spaces more accessible to the communities they serve. Class Pictures (2002-2006) is a striking series of large-scale color portraits and texts of high-school students from a range of economic, social, and ethnic backgrounds. In this project, Bey collaborated with young people and institutions throughout the United States to produce a diverse collection of portraits that challenge stereotypes of teenagers. His more recent work focuses on the construction of history and collective memory. The Birmingham Project (2013) is a paired portrait series that memorializes the lives of six young African American children killed in the Ku Klux Klan’s bombing of the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. In Harlem Redux (2014-2017), Bey revisits Harlem to witness an urban landscape dramatically transformed by gentrification. Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2017) is a series of large-scale, black-and-white series of photographs that reimagine the landscape of the Underground Railroad, a network of secret routes and safe houses that aided enslaved African Americans on their path to freedom. Bey is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a MacArthur Genius Award in 2017. In 2024, Bey celebrated his induction into the Academy of Arts and Sciences.