An-My Lê with Dr. Lucy Bowditch

An-My Lê was born in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1960. Lê fled Vietnam with her family as a teenager in 1975, the final year of the war, eventually settling in the United States as a political refugee. Her photographs and films examine the impact, consequences, and representation of war. Whether in color or black-and-white, her pictures frame a tension between the natural landscape and its violent transformation into battlefields. She has received many awards, including fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1997) and the New York Foundation for the Arts (1996). She has had major exhibitions at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, MoMA, and elsewhere. Lê lives and works in New York.

Dr. Lucy Bowditch received her doctorate in Art History from the University of Chicago in 1994, and has been teaching full time at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York, since 1995. She regularly teaches Modern Art, Contemporary Art, and History of Photography. Her interest in notions of public and private is longstanding. In addition to delivering an initial conference paper “Public and Private in Light of Lingerie,” and consequently publishing an essay on the topic, she taught a course titled “Constructions of Public and Private Space” at the New School and chaired a College Art Association session with the same title. She regularly delivers conference papers on the topic.