ANN FESSLER
UPCOMING SYMPOSIUM
The Art of Photographic Bookmaking: Inspiration, Creation & Acquisition
(Special Guest)
Ann Fessler is an author, filmmaker, book and installation artist. She has spent more than thirty years bringing feminist issues and the stories of ordinary people into the public sphere where they can contribute to a more expansive and inclusive understanding of history. The majority of her work has addressed the themes of family and adoption.
Fessler is Professor Emerita at Rhode Island School of Design, where she taught for 24 years and served as both the Head of the Photography Department and the Director of the Graduate Program in Photography.
Her audio and video installations have been exhibited widely at contemporary art centers and universities and she is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including an Artist's Fellowships from National Endowment of the Arts, the Rhode Island Foundation, the LEF Foundation, and a Radcliffe Fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She has been awarded residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Visual Studies Workshop, and Nexus Press.
Fessler has produced three documentary films, including “A Girl Like Her” (2011, “Women Make Movies”, NY), which has been screened widely at colleges, conferences, and film festivals in the US and abroad, and was subtitled in five languages. Her non-fiction book, “The Girls Who Went Away” (2006, Penguin Press), was chosen as one of the top five non-fiction books of the year by the National Book Critics Circle, and was the recipient of the Ballard Book Prize.
She is the author of five artist’s books, including those published by Tyler Offset Press, Visual Studies Workshop, Nexus Press, and the National Museum of American Art. Her books are in the artist's book collections of major museums in the US and abroad, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum, and the Whitney Museum, the Tate Britain, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. She is currently finishing a new hybrid photo book/artist's book/memoir about her adoptive father called “The Things He Gave Me and The Things I Took”.
