LaToya Ruby Frazier

LaToya Ruby Frazier is an American photographer and visual artist based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She is best known for her multidisciplinary projects exploring the socio-economic, racial and cultural implications of the erosion of industrial manufacturing and labor in the United States. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. Frazier was born in 1982 in Braddock, Pennsylvania, a once-thriving steel town outside of Pittsburgh. She is a first-generation college student and earned her BFA from the School of Visual Arts and her MFA from Yale University. In 2005, Frazier made history as the first African American student to graduate from the Yale University MFA Photography Program. She has also been a professor of photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and in 2018, was named as a professor of photography at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Frazier’s work is informed and enriched by her commitment to social justice and an exploration of the complexities of family, identity, and place. Her projects,