Lambert Family Photography Symposium

Groundbreaking artist and MacArthur Fellow Dawoud Bey examines the Black past and present. His photographs and film installations have been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the United States and Europe. Bey’s work has been the subject of numerous solo museum exhibitions, including Dawoud Bey: An American Project organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2020–2022), and Elegy at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) (2023–2024) and New Orleans Museum of Art (2024–2025). Bey was recently recognized by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2024) and has been the subject of several monographs, including Elegy (Aperture and VMFA, 2023), which chronicles Bey's history projects and landscape-based work. Bey lives and works in Chicago and New York. He is an alumnus of Yale University and is Professor Emeritus at Columbia College Chicago.

Professor Mark Sealy is Director of Autograph (London) and Professor of Photography, Rights and Representation at University of the Arts London. Author of two celebrated books published by Lawrence Wishart, Photography: Race, Rights and Representation (2022) and Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time (2019), Sealy is interested in the relationship between art, photography, social change, identity politics, race, and human rights. He has written for many of the world’s leading photographic journals, produced numerous artist publications, curated exhibitions, and commissioned photographers and filmmakers worldwide.  

Art historian and arts administrator Gaëtane Verna is the Wexner Center's executive director. Since 2012, Verna has been the director and artistic director of The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto. She was executive director and chief curator of the Musée d’art de Joliette in Québec from 2006 to 2012. Prior to her appointment at Joliette, Verna served as curator of the Foreman Art Gallery at Bishop’s University (1999–2006) in Sherbrooke, Québec, while also teaching in the art history department of both Bishop’s University and the Université du Québec à Montréal.

Since 1998, Verna has curated and organized exhibitions by emerging, midcareer, and established Canadian and international artists. She has also edited and contributed essays to numerous books and catalogues.