Dawoud Bey

Dawoud Bey began his career as a photographer in 1975 with a series of photographs, "Harlem, USA" that were later exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979 in his first one-person exhibition. Portraits have continued to be central to his work as a photographer, and he has become known for large-scale, color photographs that have often combined several panels to present a multi-layered view of the sitter.

Since 1992 Bey has completed a number of collaborative projects working with young people and museums. These projects have involved teens, museums, and cultural institutions in a broad dialogue that creates an engaging space for artmaking and institutional interrogation; they have also been aimed at broadening the participation of various communities in these institutions. Such short-term artist's residencies have occurred at the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, which in 1995 also organized a mid-career retrospective of Bey's photographs in that traveled to eight cities in the United States and Europe.

Bey's work has also been featured in group exhibitions at institutions including the Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, New Hampshire; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo, Japan; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Art Institute of Chicago. His photographs are included in the permanent collections of many of these institutions as well as others throughout the United States and Europe.

Bey, who received his Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University in 1993, is currently a professor of photography at Columbia College Chicago. He is regularly invited to speak on contemporary art and photography at institutions around the United States. He has received awards and fellowships from agencies including the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and was recently awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship and a Percent for Art commission from Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs. He is presently represented in the United States by Gorney Bravin + Lee Gallery, New York and Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, and in Europe by Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin.

Dan Collison and Elizabeth Meister

Dan Collison and Elizabeth Meister run Long Haul Productions, a not-for-profit organization specializing in radio and video documentaries about people and places overlooked by the mainstream media. Executive Director/Producer Dan Collison started work in public radio as a volunteer in 1980. After four years as senior producer and editor of National Public Radio's All Things Considered (Weekend) he founded Long Haul Productions (formerly called DC Productions) in 1992. Since then he has been a regular contributor to NPR and has been honored with many awards, including the prestigious duPont-Columbia Award for his story Scenes from a Transplant (the film version aired on HBO). He conducted oral history interviews for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and collaborated with Dawoud Bey as a contributor to the exhibition and book Local Heroes: Changing America, a project that matched prominent producers and photographers in an effort to document the work of grass roots community organizations in America. Producer Elizabeth Meister quit her job at the phone company to volunteer for public radio show This American Life in 1998, when she started their award-winning website in exchange for a chance to learn how to make radio documentaries. Since then, she has produced and/or reported stories for This American Life and other NPR programs. Long Haul Productions radio documentary Movin' Out the Bricks, which follows Catherine Means as she and her family move from Chicago's Stateway Gardens housing project into their first private-market apartment, was premiered on Chicago Public Radio in March 2003.