AMANI WILLETT
(American, b. 1975)

Amani Willett is a Brooklyn and Boston-based photographer whose practice is driven by conceptual ideas surrounding family, history, memory, and the social environment.

Working primarily with the book form, his three monographs have been published to widespread critical acclaim. Disquiet (Damiani, 2013), The Disappearance of Joseph Plummer (Overlapse, 2017), and A Parallel Road (Overlapse 2020) were selected by Photo-Eye as “best books” of the year and have been highlighted in over 70 publications including Photograph Magazine, PDN, Hyperallergic, Lensculture, New York Magazine, 1000 Words, NPR, The British Journal of Photography, Collector Daily and Buzzfeed and recommended by Todd Hido, Elisabeth Biondi (former Visuals Editor of The New Yorker), Vince Aletti and David Campany, among others.

Amani’s photographs are also featured in the books American Geography (SF Moma/Radius Books, 2021), Bystander: A History of Street Photography (2017 edition, Laurence King Publishing), Street Photography Now (Thames and Hudson), New York: In Color (Abrams), and have been published widely in places including The Atlantic, American Photography, Newsweek, Harper’s, The Huffington Post, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine and The New York Review of Books.

His work resides in the permanent collections of the Tate Modern, The Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Sir Elton John Photography Collection, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Oxford University, and Harvard University, among others.

Amani completed an MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts, NY in 2012 and a BA from Wesleyan University in 1997. In addition to his artistic practice, Amani is a professor of photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston.