Considered one of the most influential contemporary American artists, Carrie Mae Weems has investigated yearning, loss, cultural identity, and the visual consequences of power throughout her renowned career. Weems received her B.A. from the California Institute of the Arts and an M.F.A. from the University of California at San Diego, and studied folklore at the University of California, Berkeley with the late Alan Dundes. She was awarded the Pollack Krasner Foundation Grant in Photography, the Visual Arts Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and is a recipient of the Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize Fellowship, one of the most prestigious awards in American culture.In 2005, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch called her series, From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, which was originally commissioned by the J. Paul Getty Museum, "one of the masterpieces of our time." Weems has exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe, Africa, and Asia, and has had solo and group shows at the High Museum of Art, the International Center for Photography, the Miami Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Walker Art Center.She is represented in public and private collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Museum of Modern Art. Her work has also been featured in Dak'Art, the Biennale of Contemporary Art in Senegal, the Johannesburg Biennale in South Africa, and the Whitney Biennial in the United States. 

April 20th, 1953 in Portland (Age 71)