Sheila Pree Bright

Early life and education

Sheila Pree Bright was born in Waycross, GA in 1967. As a member of a military family, she spent her early childhood in Germany and later moved back to the United States, moving between several states including Colorado and Kansas. None of these locations had significant black populations, a fact that would later inform her work. She earned a BS from the University of Missouri in 1998. Her initial interest in photography began while taking a photojournalism class during her senior year of college. She moved to Atlanta in 1997 and received her MFA from Georgia State University in 2003.

Career

Sheila Pree Bright is often described as a "Cultural Anthropologist." Her earliest experience as a photographer began when she spent time in Houston where she began photographing the gangsta rap scene and confronting the dynamic between Hip hop and gun culture. In 2003, she created her MFA thesis photo series, Plastic Bodies, which would later be featured in the film Through the Lens Darkly and go viral on Huffington Post in 2013. In these photographs, she manipulated images of black women and barbie dolls in an attempt to challenge the western ideals of whiteness and beauty and explore the impact these ideals have on girls and women of color. Bright later earned national acclaim when she won the Center Prize at the Santa Fe Center of Photography in 2006 for her Suburbia series which features images of African American suburban life. In 2008, she premiered her first solo exhibition at the High Museum of Art, featuring her series Young Americans. These photographers were a response to the commonly negative portrayals of Millennials. She allowed her subjects to use their own props, clothes, and poses in an attempt to "give them a platform to speak for themselves."

Bright was selected for the Museum of Contemporary of Art of Georgia's Working Artist Project in 2014, during which she created her series 1960Who. In this work, she created portraits of several civil rights activists of the 60s and 70s, including Dr. Roslyn Pope, Lonnie King, Herman Russel, Charles Person, and Claire O'Connor. In addition to the museum exhibition, she plastered these portraits on large public walls throughout downtown Atlanta in honor and celebration of their activism. In 2014 and 2015, Bright visited Ferguson and Baltimore after the murders of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray to photograph and document the protests. The culmination of these photos would become her series 1960Now.

Collections

Awards, Fellowships and Residencies