Photographer MJ Sharp is an artist and educator based in Durham, North Carolina. She was a visiting Fulbright Scholar at the University of Exeter, UK, for the 2021/2022 academic year pursuing the art/science collaboration Our Disappearing Darkness and Recreating True Night with nocturnal ecologist Dr. Kevin Gaston. She was a Lecturing Fellow at The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University from 2012 — 2022. She served on the Faculty Advisory Committee of the Nasher Museum of Art and was also a founding member of the Duke Faculty Union.

 

Her artwork is included in the collections of The Akron Art Museum, The Asheville Museum of Art, The North Carolina Museum of Art, The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, The Ackland Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, The Henry-Copeland Art Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and The Cassilhaus Collection. Poet and art critic Chris Vitiello's review of the Light Cache show is a comprehensive introduction to her work. A behind-the-scenes look at the pivotal Scotland project investor show at Cassilhaus is here.

 

She worked closely with writers and reporters on both short and longform journalism stories as the staff photographer and photography editor at the Independent in Durham for most of the 1990’s.  During much of that time she also freelanced regionally for The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, PBS’s Frontline, The Columbia Journalism Review, and The Ford Foundation, among others.

Greeting Tillie Dog, Cornwall, UK 2022