Maurice Berger

Maurice Berger is a writer, cultural historian, and curator whose work focuses on the intersection of race and visual culture. He is research professor and chief curator at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Race Stories, his monthly column, for the Lens Section of the New York Times, explores the relationship of photography to concepts and social issues about race not usually covered in the mainstream media. His writings have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Aperture, National Geographic, Village Voice, Brooklyn Rail, Pen America, Wired, and the Los Angeles Times. He books include White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), a finalist for Horace Mann Bond Book Award of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research, Harvard University, and For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Yale, 2010).

Berger has curated more than 30 exhibitions, which have appeared in national and international institutions including the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, National Civil Rights Museum (Memphis), Whitney Museum of American Art, International Center of Photography, Corcoran Gallery of Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York), Addison Gallery of American Art, The Andy Warhol Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem, Barbican Centre (London), Santa Monica Museum of Art, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, and the Kemper Museum of the Kansas City Art Institute.

Berger has received honors and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, Association of Art Museum Curators, International Association of Art Critics, as well as an Emmy Award nomination. For his work on Race Stories, he was awarded the 2018 Infinity Award for Critical Writing and Research from the International Center of Photography and the 2014 Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation | Creative Capital.