Maurice Berger is a writer, cultural historian, and curator whose work focuses on the intersection of race and visual culture. He is research professor and chief curator at the Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Race Stories, his monthly column, for the Lens section of the New York Times, explores the relationship of photography to concepts and social issues about race not usually covered in the mainstream media. His writings have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Aperture, Village Voice, Brooklyn Rail, Pen America, Wired, National Geographic, and the Los Angeles Times. His books include White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), a finalist for Horace Mann Bond Book Award of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research, Harvard University, and For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Yale, 2010). Berger has received honors and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, Association of Art Museum Curators, International Association of Art Critics, as well as an Emmy Award nomination. For his work on Race Stories, he was awarded the 2014 Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.
Maurice Berger–cultural historian, and columnist for the New York Times’ Race Stories–has spent his career studying and teaching racial literacy through visual literacy.