Civitella Board Director Deborah Willis was recently featured on an episode of the podcast The Design of Business | The Business of Design. She was interviewed by Jessica Helfand (DG 2018) and Ellen McGirt.
Deborah Willis is an artist, curator, and a professor at New York University. Her most recent book is The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship, just longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award in Nonfiction.
“Willis first took up the question of ‘Where are the Black photographers?’ as a graduate student: ‘The only images that we saw of Black people were people being beaten, the labored body, which we all know happened. But there were also other Black experiences that were about love and about work and about pride. So when I brought that up in the classroom, I didn’t think that, 40 some odd years later, I’m still doing the same research.'” Listen to the episode here.