Biography

LaToya Ruby Frazier born in Pittsburgh PA in 1982 received her BFA in Photography and Graphic Design in 2004 at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. She received her MFA in Art Photography from the School of Visual Performing Arts in 2007 at Syracuse University. She has been an artist in resident at Art Omi in 2009, Center for Photography at Woodstock in 2008 and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2007. She is currently an artist and resident at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and New York University in New York City.

With influences of documentary photography and direct cinema Frazier utilizes photography and video to produce work that intensely explores her family's intergenerational lineage by defining the lines between private and public space, emotion, reality, memory and human complexity.

The Notion of Family, is a collaborative development between her grandmother, mother and herself. Through black and white photographs and an experimental documentary video series, A Mother to Hold, Frazier's honest and relentless approach intensely explores their psychological intergenerational lineage through the 1930s, 1960s and 1980s.

A Mother to Hold was screened at the Black Maria Film Festival in Jersey City, NJ, San Diego Women's Film Festival, Aurora Picture Show in Houston Texas, Brooklyn Underground Film Festival, the Black International Film Festival and the Women of Color Film Festival in New York City where she received the Producers Choice Award.

Frazier's work has been written about in The New York Times, The New Yorker, ArtForum, Artnet, The Brooklyn Rail and The Village Voice. She received the 2007 Geraldine Dodge Fellowship Award as the 2006 College Art Association Professional development recipient. She is a member of En Foco and Society for Photographic Education. Her works have been exhibited in many exhibitions including, The New Museum, Bronx Museum, National Academy Museum, in New York City and internationally in Copenhagen Denmark. Her work is represented by Higher Pictures in New York City.

Frazier has worked as a photo editor for Newsweek and is currently the Associate Curator for the Mason Gross Galleries in the Department for Visual Arts where she also teaches photography in the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, New Brunswick NJ.