by Deborah Willis
Dr. Deborah Willis, chair of the Tisch Department of Photography & Imaging, was recently featured in Vice Magazine's Women Seeing Women column.
Vice's Elyssa Goodman wrote:
It is a storied career, to say the least, and yet it’s one she almost didn’t have at all. While in college, a photography professor told her she “took a space from a good man” that she was just going to end up married and pregnant so why bother taking classes? But she wouldn’t let that messaging stop her. Surrounded by a supportive family and other professors who were interested her work, she knew she could prove her original professor wrong. And to say that she has since done this is a vast understatement. She even revived some self-portraits from those earlier years, and made them into a collage celebrating the life of her son, the successful artist Hank Willis Thomas. Written over the strip of images are the words “I made space for a good man.”
Among Dr. Willis's numerous achievements and distinctions are a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the Richard D. Cohen Fellowship in African American Art at Harvard University's Hutchins Center, an Alphonse Fletcher Jr. Fellowship, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, two NAACP Image Awards for Outstanding Literary Work, an ICP Infinity Award for Writing, and she is the author or co-author of over 20 books.