• Lewis Watts
• Professor Emeritus of Art at UC Santa Cruz
• University of California Santa Cruz

Lewis Watts is a photographer, archivist/curator and Professor Emeritus of Art at UC Santa Cruz where he taught for 14 years. Before that he taught in the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley. His research and artwork centers around the “cultural landscape” primarily in communities in the African diaspora. He is a documentary photographer and also examines the archive of 19th. And 20th. Century African American Literature and ephemera. He is the co-author of Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era” Heyday Books Berkeley 2020, “New Orleans Suite: Music and Culture in Transition” UC Press 2013 and “Portraits” Edition One Press Berkeley 2020. His work has been exhibited at and/or is in the collections of The Zimmerli Museum, Rutgers University (Seize the Time), Staatiche Kunstammiunger, Dresden Germany, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art: University of Oregon, Autograph London, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Citè de La Musique, Paris France, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, The Oakland Museum of California, The Neuberger museum of Art, Purchase NY, The Amistad Center for Art and Culture, Hartford, Conn, Light Work, Syracuse NY, The Paul Sack Collection, San Francisco, The McEvoy Foundation, San Francisco among others. He is affiliated with the Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco. He is currently working on photographic projects: “Charleston and the Low Country” for the African American Museum there, Portraits of Black Creatives, “The Black Presence in France” and effects of migration throughout America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Speaking In:

• Contemporary Art–Painting, Public Art, Photography