Public Education: Institute of International Studies; UC Berkeley
The Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, in concert with the Institute of International Studies, welcomes noted photographer Wendy Ewald to the University of California, Berkeley, as the 1998 visiting Una Lecturer.
For more than twenty-five years, Ms. Ewald has taught photography to children and young people around the world. (See related article, Wendy Ewald: Children and Photography.) She has encouraged her students to become photographers in their own right, turning their experiences and dreams into powerful, poetic images. Likening herself to a "translator" of those images, her long-standing commitment to helping children recognize the worth of their own visions has gained her numerous awards and widespread recognition.
Born in Detroit, Michigan, Wendy Ewald attended Antioch College and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she studied photography with Minor White. After teaching photography to Naskapi and MicMac Native children in Canada for several years, Ms. Ewald was sponsored by the Kentucky Arts Commission to teach photography and filmmaking to students in Whitesburg, Kentucky from 1976 to 1980. In 1982, after receiving a Fulbright fellowship, Ms. Ewald traveled to Raquira, Colombia. During her two years there, she helped transform children into young photographers. After completing a similar two-year project in Gujarat, India, in 1989, Ms. Ewald created the Literacy through Photography programs in Houston, Texas, and Durham, North Carolina. In 1996, she was a visiting associate professor at Bard College. Currently, she is a Senior Research Associate at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and Project Director of the Literacy through Photography program.
Ms. Ewald has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship, several National Endowment for the Arts grants, and the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Visual Arts Fellowship for South Africa. In recent years, she has lectured widely through the recognition of the Caixa Foundation in Barcelona, Spain; the Buffalo State College Distinguished Lecturer Series; and the Mondrian Foundation Commission and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
Una's Lectures in the Humanities, endowed in memory of Una Smith Ross, Berkeley class of 1911, are administered by the Townsend Center for the Humanities.
Credits
Harry Kreisler, Executive Producer
Letitia Carper, Design and Layout
Julian Bourg, Researcher and Writer
Professor Randy Starn is the Director of the Townsend Center for the Humanities, and Professor Michael Watts is the Director of the Institute of International Studies.
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