Celestia Morgan has been appointed assistant professor of art in The University of Alabama’s Department of Art and Art History. She will begin the new position on August 16, 2022, teaching courses in digital and film photography. Morgan has served as a postdoctoral research associate in the College of Arts and Sciences since the fall of 2020.
Associate professor of photography Christopher Jordan said, “We were extremely pleased to have welcomed Celestia Morgan to the department and photography area as a postdoc teaching fellow. She is an excellent teacher and students have gained tremendously from her presence. We look forward to welcoming Morgan to our department as a full-time colleague.”
Morgan works across several artistic mediums, incorporating sculpture, map-making and community engagement into her photography and video work to explore systemic racism through racial zoning practices and environmental injustice.
She is the recipient of an Alabama State Council on the Arts Media/Photography Fellowship and a Collaborative Art Research Initiative (CARI) Joint Pilot for Arts and Research grant. Her public art project, “Dear Black Son,” is supported by the National Performance Network (NPN) Artist Engagement Fund in collaboration with Space One Eleven.
Morgan’s recent exhibitions include Disparities, a solo exhibition at the Paul R. Jones Museum, Tuscaloosa; REDLINE, a solo exhibition at the Birmingham Museum of Art; the National Public Housing Museum’s Undesign the Redline in Chicago, Illinois; New Southern Photography curated by Richard McCabe at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, and Land Line: Navigating Our Environment, at the Corn Center for the Visual Arts in Columbus, Georgia. Morgan has also exhibited her work at the Minneapolis Institute of Art; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Ark.; and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, Birmingham, Ala. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Lenscratch, The Bitter Southerner, Art Papers, the Southern Foodways Alliance journal Gravy; New Southern Photography; and Burnaway and is in the permanent collections of museums including Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Birmingham Museum of Art and many private collections across the country.
Celestia Morgan was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, where she taught visual arts in the Birmingham City Schools. She holds the BFA in photography from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the MFA in photography from The University of Alabama. Her website is here.
For more information about the programs in the UA Department of Art and Art History, go to this page or contact the department at (205) 348-5967.