Wendy Ewald has for forty years collaborated in art projects with children, families, women, and teachers in Labrador, Colombia, India, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Holland, Mexico, and the United States. Starting as documentary investigations of places and communities, Ms. Ewald's projects probe questions of identity and cultural differences. In her work with children she encourages them to use cameras to record themselves, their families, and their communities, and to articulate their fantasies and dreams. She often makes photographs within the communities she works with and has the children mark or write on her negatives, thereby challenging the concept of who actually makes an image, who is the photographer, who the subject, who is the observer and who the observed. In blurring the distinction of individual authorship and throwing into doubt the artist's intentions, power, and identity, Ms. Ewald creates opportunities to look at the meaning and use of photographic images in our lives with fresh perceptions.
Wendy Ewald has received many honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Andy Warhol Foundation, and the Fulbright Commission. She was also a senior fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School from 2000-2002. She was awarded an honorary doctorate from Bank Street College of Education in 2005. She has had solo exhibitions at the International Center of Photography in New York, the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, the George Eastman House in Rochester, Nederlands Foto Institute in Rotterdam, the Fotomuseum in Wintherthur, Switzerland, and the Corcoran Gallery of American Art among others. Her work was included in the 1997 Whitney Biennial. She has published ten books, her fifth, a retrospective documenting her projects entitled Secret Games, was published by Scalo in 2000. Two books on recent projects were published in 2005. A third, "To The Promised land" was published in 2006 to accompany an outdoor installation in Margate, England commissioned by ArtAngel. She is currently teaching at Amherst College. She also remains an artist in residence at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. From 2009-2012 she received a commission to work in Israel and the West Bank. In 2012, she received a Guggenheim for Portraits and Dreams Revisited, a film and book, which chronicles the lives of her Appalachian students from 1975-present day.