Ann Fessler

Ann Fessler is an author, filmmaker, and book and installation artist who has spent more than thirty years bringing feminist issues and the stories of ordinary people into public consciousness, expanding the way history is told and understood. Much of her work explores themes of family, identity, and adoption.

Fessler is Professor Emerita at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she taught for 24 years and served as both the Head of the Photography Department and Director of the Graduate Program in Photography. Her audio and video installations have been exhibited widely at contemporary art centers and universities. She has received numerous grants and fellowships, including awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rhode Island Foundation, the LEF Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She has also completed residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Wexner Center for the Arts, Visual Studies Workshop, and Nexus Press.

Fessler has produced three documentary films, including A Girl Like Her (2011, Women Make Movies, NY), which has been screened at colleges, conferences, and film festivals across the U.S. and abroad, and translated into five languages. Her nonfiction book The Girls Who Went Away (Penguin Press, 2006) was named one of the top five nonfiction books of the year by the National Book Critics Circle and won the Ballard Book Prize.

She is also the author of five artist’s books, published by presses including Tyler Offset Press, Visual Studies Workshop, Nexus Press, and the National Museum of American Art. Her books are held in major museum collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, Tate Britain, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Fessler is currently completing a new hybrid photo book, artist’s book, and memoir titled The Things He Gave Me and The Things I Took, which focuses on her adoptive father.