For more than thirty years, Wendy Ewald has collaborated with children and adults around the world, working in communities in Labrador, Appalachia, Colombia, India, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Holland, Mexico, Canada, North Carolina, and New York. She partners her keen observational and creative skills with her students' imaginations, encouraging them to use cameras to create individual self-portraits and portraits of their communities and to articulate their dreams and hopes while working with her in visual and verbal collaboration.
Born in Detroit in 1951, Ewald is currently a senior research associate at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies and an artist-in-residence at the university’s John Hope Franklin Center. Over a decade ago, she founded the Literacy Through Photograph program in Durham, North Carolina, now thriving in many elementary and middle schools.
Ewald has received many honors in recognition of her innovative creative practice, including a MacArthur Fellowship and a Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Visual Arts Fellowship, as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Andy Warhol Foundation, and the Fulbright Commission.