Judith Joy Ross (b. 1946, Hazleton, Pa.) graduated with a BS from the Moore College of Art, Philadelphia, in 1968 and received a MS degree two years later from the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago. An heir to cultural documentarians such as August Sander and Diane Arbus, Ross has created sensitive and penetrating portraits of school children, teenagers, visitors to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., members of the United States Congress, and most recently, of Americans protesting the U.S. war in Iraq. Ross has been exhibiting her photography for the past two decades. Her work has been the subject of solo shows, including “New Work” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1993), “Selections from Portraits at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington D.C., 1983-84 and Portraits of the United States Congress, 1986-87” at the Sprengel Museum, Hannover (1996), and “Portraits from the Hazleton Public Schools: 1992-1994” at the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Mass. (1996). The Allentown Art Museum in Pennsylvania organized Ross’s first retrospective in 1997. In March 2008 the Josef Albers Museum in Bottrop, Germany, opened “Living with War: Portraits 1983-2007.” Comprised of over 80 prints, the exhibition highlights Ross’s most recent “Protest” series. A forthcoming show of her work in early 2009 is also being planned by San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Ross’s work has been featured in over 50 group shows, including, “The Persistence of Photography in American Portraiture” at the Yale University Art Gallery (2000), “Open Ends: Innocence and Experience” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2000), and “Making Faces: The Death of the Portrait” at the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, and the Hayward Gallery, London (2003-04). Ross is a recipient of numerous honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1985), a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1986), a Charles Pratt Memorial Award (1992), and an Andrea Frank Foundation Award (1998). Ross’s work can be found in numerous permanent collections, including the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Mass.; the Birmingham Museum of Fine Arts, Ala.; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum Ludwig, Cologne; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the August Sander Archive, Cologne; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Sprengel Museum, Hannover; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn. Monographs of Ross’s photography include Judith Joy Ross: Contemporaries/A Photography Series (MoMA, 1995); Portraits of the Hazleton Public Schools (Yale University Press, 2006); Protest the War (Steidl, 2007); and Living With War: Portraits 1983-2007 (Steidl, 2008). Ross lives and works in Pennsylvania. Go back to top               Printable PDF version