Myra Greene, M.F.A., has been a Faculty Member Since 2016 and a professor and program director for photography in the Department of Art and Visual Culture.
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Myra Greene enjoys exploring photographic processes that engage issues about the body, memory, the absorption of culture and the ever-shifting identity of African Americans. Greene is currently working on a new body of work that uses African textiles as a material and pattern to explore her own relationship to culture. In a previous body of work, Greene created benign portraits of cross sections of white American life. The impetus for these photographs, titled "My White Friends," lies in the undercurrent of racial description and the performance of identity. By photographing friends, peers and mentors, Greene visually ponders if photography can capture and describe the nuances of whiteness.
In her work "Character Recognition," Greene uses a historical photographic process associated with the era of ethnographic classification to repeatedly explore her ethnic features. Often haunting and frightening, these glass plate ambrotypes are a contemplation on how we see blackness in these modern times.
Greene has received an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Photography and has completed residencies at Light Work in Syracuse, New York, and the Center for Photography at Woodstock.
Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. Greene's work has been featured in national exhibitions in galleries and museums including The New York Public Library, Duke Center for Documentary Studies, Williams College Museum of Art, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in Atlanta, Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, and Sculpture Center in New York City. Myra Greene was born in New York City and received her B.F.A. from Washington University in St. Louis and her M.F.A. in photography from the University of New Mexico.
M.F.A., University of New Mexico
B.F.A., Washington University in St. Louis
Photography, Art, Visual Culture, Identity Politics
Taking Another Look at Race
Photographer Examines What Being white looks like. by Victoria Fleischer PBS NEWSHOUR May 1, 2014
Interview With Frank Stasio. NPR. The State of Things. April 8, 2014
Some of Her Best Friends Are White. New York Times. May 22, 2012