Elle Pérez appointed Assistant Professor in Photography

The Yale School of Art is pleased to share the appointment of Elle Pérez as Assistant Professor in Photography for the 2023-24 academic year. Elle Pérez is an artist who works in photography and moving image, depicting intimate moments, emotional exchanges, and visceral details within their portraits, landscapes, and videos. In Pérez’s work, people are not simply subjected to the process of making a photograph; they are essential to both the creation of the image and its life and distribution thereafter. Through collaborative efforts with their subjects, Pérez creates photographs that encapsulate the dynamic nature of identity, reflecting its perpetual evolution.

Joining the School of Art from Harvard University’s Art, Film, and Visual Studies department, Pérez has also previously held appointments at Williams College, Cooper Union, and taught photography at the Educational Alliance Art School in New York City. Pérez received a BFA in Photography from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from Yale School of Art.

Their work has been exhibited across the United States and internationally and has been the subject of institutional solo exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Public Art Fund, New York; and MoMA PS1, New York. They were included in the 59th International Venice Biennale and the 2019 Whitney Biennial. In 2023, Pérez will have exhibitions at MASS MoCA and at 47 Canal, New York. Pérez is also the recipient of the distinguished Abigail Cohen Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome.

Pérez’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, among others.