Dawoud Bey
Dawoud Bey is a widely celebrated photographer and educator whose work engages with the Black presence in America, both past and present. Predominantly working in portraiture for the first several decades of his career, more recent projects utilize landscape to open a dialog about intentionally hidden American stories, exploring how places can hold memory.
Watch
The Artist "Dawoud Bey: Elegy" Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Selected Work
Artist News
Award
Dawoud Bey | American Academy Berlin Prize Fellow
Visual Arts, Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellow, Class of Spring 2026
Lecture
Dawoud Bey | Landscape & Memory
American Academy in Berlin
February 24, 2026
In-person & Live Stream
Group Exhibition
(Re)Constructing History
SFMOMA
October 4, 2025–May 3, 2026
(Re)Constructing History, an exhibition of works from SFMOMA’s photography collection, reconsiders moments from the history of photography, anchored by Carrie Mae Weems’ major series, Constructing History.
Group Exhibition
Faces in the Crowd: Street Photography | Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
October 11, 2025–July 13, 2026
This exhibition, including work by Dawoud Bey among many others, explores the evolving techniques photographers have used to record the human experience as it has played out in populous urban spaces—from Harlem and Los Angeles to Tokyo and Istanbul—over five decades.
Group Exhibition
From Now: A Collection in Context | Studio Museum in Harlem
November 15, 2025–August 16, 2026
From Now: A Collection in Context, including work by Dawoud Bey, is a dynamic, shifting installation of thematic exchanges drawn entirely from the Studio Museum in Harlem’s collection and installed throughout the building.
Group Exhibition
Containing Multitudes | Minneapolis Institute of Art
December 20, 2025 – August 2, 2026
This exhibition explores the diversity of American experience that photographs can hold, and the manner in which photographers have sought to “contain multitudes,” in the words of the 19th-century writer Walt Whitman, by maintaining an expansive ecosystem of images celebrating the contradictions of American life, culture, and history.
Above image by Xavier Tavera
Exhibition Catalog
Gallery Exhibitions
Dawoud Bey: 2020 Exhibition
February 1 – March 21, 2020
Dawoud Bey: The Birmingham Project
September 5 – October 19, 2013
Dawoud Bey: 2001 Exhibition
June 7 – July 14, 2001
