Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe’s work chronicles the Black experience in the United States and beyond, experiments with still lifes and formal abstractions, and engages with the history of photography. Her images have appeared in Ebony, Life, People and the New York Times, and are held in the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is the author of five books, including Daufuskie Island: Photographs by Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, whose twenty-fifth-anniversary edition won the Essence Literary Award in Photography. With her many years devoted to issues in health, the arts, and civil rights, Moutoussamy-Ashe’s photography is interwoven with her activism. She is a director of the Arthur Ashe Endowment for the Defeat of AIDS and serves on the board of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and on the President’s Council of the Cooper Union.
