Anthony W. Lee is an art historian, critic, curator and photographer.  He earned his PhD in 1995 from the University of California at Berkeley and is the Idella Plimpton Kendall Professor of Art History at Mount Holyoke College, where he teaches courses on modern art.  As a critic and scholar, he writes about painting and vernacular and fine art photography between 1840 and 1960.  The subjects range widely, from early photographic portraits of French Canadian and Chinese migrants, to the murals of Diego Rivera, to the press pictures of the great New York tabloid cameraman Weegee, to the experimental work of Scotland's first photographers.  He is the founder and editor of the acclaimed series of books, Defining Moments in American Photography, published by the University of California Press.  His own photography generally falls into two broad categories: a meditation on the uses and meanings of common pictures from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and an exploration of social change in ethnic and diasporic communities and of the remnants of earlier industrial cultures.  These various projects include imaginative pairings or continuations of the work of other photographers, such as Lewis Hine, Alice Austen, and Liu Zheng; documentaries of American Chinatowns; ruminations on the detritus of old factory towns; and assessments of the history and survival of immigrant societies along New England's waterways.  He has curated shows that together span a range of painterly and photographic practices, including the work of the photographer Diane Arbus, the early twentieth-century painter and poet Yun Gee, and contemporary social and transnational photographers such as Livia Corona, Binh Danh, Jason Francisco, Julia Komissaroff, Pok Chi Lau, Ken Light, and Paul Weinberg.  He is the recipient of the Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art, given by the Smithsonian's National Museum of American Art, and the Cultural Studies Book Award, given by the Association of Asian American Studies; and fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the J. Paul Getty Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, and the Terra Giverny Foundation.

Contact: awlee@mtholyoke.edu