Deborah Willis is Chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She is the recipient of Fletcher, Guggenheim, and MacArthur fellowships, and is author of Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography (The New Press, 1994); Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present (W. W. Norton, 2009); and co-author of A Small Nation of People: W.E.B. Du Bois and African-American Portraits of Progress (Amistad, 2003).