Authors

Gregory Harris is the High Museum of Art’s Donald and Marilyn Keough Family Curator of Photography. He is a specialist in contemporary photography with a particular interest in documentary practice. Since joining the High in 2016, Harris has curated over a dozen exhibitions, including Picturing the South: 25 Years (2021), Mark Steinmetz: Terminus (2018), Paul Graham: The Whiteness of the Whale (2017), and Amy Elkins: Black is the Day, Black is the Night (2017). For the Museum’s 2018 collection reinstallation, he surveyed a broad sweep of the history of photography through prints from the High’s holdings in Look Again: 45 Years of Collecting Photography. His collaborative projects have included Way Out There: The Art of Southern Backroads (2019), a joint exhibition with the High’s Folk and Self-Taught Art department.

Harris was previously the assistant curator at the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago, where he curated exhibitions including Sonja Thomsen: Glowing Wavelengths in Between (2015), The Sochi Project: An Atlas of War and Tourism in the Caucasus (2014), and Studio Malick: Portraits from Mali (2012). He also organized and authored catalogues for the exhibitions Matt Siber: Idol Structures (2015), Liminal Infrastructure (2015), and We Shall: Photographs by Paul D’Amato (2013).

Harris also held curatorial positions at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he organized the exhibitions In the Vernacular (2010) and Of National Interest (2008). His essay “Photographs Still and Unfolding” was published in Telling Tales: Contemporary Narrative Photography (San Antonio: McNay Art Museum, 2016), and he contributed essays to monographs by Amy Elkins, Matthew Brandt, Jill Frank, and Mark Steinmetz. He earned a BFA in photography from Columbia College Chicago and an MA in art history from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Maria L. Kelly is the curatorial assistant of photography at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, as well as the collection manager for The Sir Elton John Photography Collection. During her time at the High, she has helped organize more than twenty photography installations, including exhibitions featuring the work of Helen Levitt, Abelardo Morell, Thomas Struth, Wynn Bullock, and Gordon Parks, among others. She recently co-curated an exhibition at the High on women photographers throughout history, titled Underexposed: Women Photographers from the Collection (2021). Other recent projects include her master’s thesis at Columbia University, The Unfixed Landscape: Meghann Riepenhoff & Matthew Brandt (2018), which considers experimental bodies of work by both artists within the context of the history of photography and the Land Art movement, and an exhibition at the High, What Is Near: Reflections on Home (2016), which featured the work of five Southern women photographers exploring notions of home and memory.

Kelly holds an MA from Columbia University and a BA from the University of Georgia, both in art history. Previously, she worked at the Brooklyn Museum and has held internships at The Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Georgia Museum of Art.