About Prof. Weissman
Bio
Professor Weissman received her PhD from Columbia University and holds an affiliated appointment in the Unit for Criticism and Interpretative Theory. She teaches modern and contemporary art history, the history of photography, and the history of design.
She is the author of The Realisms of Berenice Abbott: Documentary Photography and Political Action (University of California Press, 2011), co-author (with Sharon Corwin and Jessica May) of American Modern: Documentary Photographs by Abbott, Evans, and Bourke-White (University of California Press, 2010), and co-author (with Erina Duganne and Heather Diack) of Photography: A Critical History (Bloombsury, 2020). Her articles and reviews have appeared in edited volumes such as Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present and journals such as Arts, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Third Text, Visual Resources, Media-N, caa.reviews, and ArtNexus. Her work has been supported by the O’Keeffe Research Center, the Smithsonian, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois, and the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities.
Her current research project, Bodies of Evidence, focuses on questions of representation and “evidence” in relation to contemporary pictures of state-sanctioned violence against black and brown bodies and other vulnerable populations. How do pictures speak to those who look? Influence those who look away? How do they ask audiences to act or not act?