Sheila Pree Bright

Sheila Pree Bright (American, b.1967), is an Atlanta-based, award-winning American photographer. 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 to challenge western ideals of whiteness and beauty and explore the impact these ideals have on Black girls and women. 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 and the Wadsworth Atheneum, featuring her series Young Americans. These photographs were a response to the commonly negative portrayals of Millennials. She allowed her subjects to use their own props, clothes, and poses “giving 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. She then made photographs of those public art installations. 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. Bright’s book #1960Now was published by Chronicle Books in 2018.

Bright completed her MFA in photography at Georgia State University in Atlanta and continues to live in that city. She has been recognized with multiple awards, including the Santa Fe Fellowship, and her photographs are in the collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Library of Congress, both in Washington, D.C., and the National Center for Civil and Human Rights and the High Museum of Art, in Atlanta, among many others.