Sam Contis appointed full-time faculty member in Photography

The Yale School of Art is pleased to announce that Sam Contis, MFA ‘08, has joined the Photography department as a full-time faculty member.

During the Fall 2024 semester, Contis will be teaching the Interdepartmental Group Critique course and in the Spring she will be teaching a new Interdepartmental class, “Artist’s Choice”. As with all of the School of Art’s full-time departmental faculty, she will also be available to MFA students in Photography for assistance or meetings, informal discussions or guidance.

“Sam brings with her a wealth of experience and achievements in both her artistic practice, and her academic career,” shared Gregory Crewdson, Director of Graduate Studies in Photography. “We are very fortunate to have her joining us at Yale.”

Sam Contis (b. 1982) works primarily in photography and moving image. Recent shows include a 2022 early-career survey, Transit, at the Carré d’Art in Nîmes, France, and a collaboration, Duet, with the vocalist Inbal Hever at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York. Her work has been shown in group exhibitions at the Barbican Art Gallery, London; the Gropius-Bau, Berlin; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She is the recipient of a 2024 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship (2022), the Nancy Graves Grant for Visual Artists (2016), and the Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellowship (2016). Contis’s work is represented in collections including the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Carré d’Art, Nîmes; Centre Pompidou, Paris; KADIST, Paris and San Francisco; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. She has published three monographs: Deep Springs (Mack, 2017), Day Sleeper (Mack, 2020), and Overpass (Aperture, 2022). In 2025 the survey exhibition Sam Contis: Moving Landscape, curated by Anna Arabindan-Kesson, will be on view at the Art Gallery of Western Australia.