2008 Juror

Rod Slemmons has been the Director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago since 2002, where he teaches undergraduate photo history and graduate theory seminars in the Photography Department. He also teaches graduate courses at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has curated six exhibitions at MOCP, including “Persistence of Vision: The Career of Paul Berger.”

Rod previously taught photography, history of photography and graduate Museum Studies for 12 years at the University of Washington in Seattle. He was the National Chair of the Society for Photographic Education from 1990 to 1994. He was named Honored Educator at the SPE National Conference in Miami in 2007.

Before and during his time at the University of Washington he was the Curator of Prints and Photographs at the Seattle Art Museum for 14 years, producing 35 exhibitions and numerous catalogs, including “Like a One-Eyed Cat” in 1989, the first retrospective of Lee Friedlander.

Rod has an MA in literature and writing from the University of Iowa. He trained as a graduate intern at the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House while working on an MFA in Photography and Museum Studies from the Rochester Institute of Technology, 1976–78.