Lonnie Graham is a photographer, a Pew Fellow and Professor at Pennsylvania State University. He is former director of Photography at Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, an urban arts organization dedicated to arts and education for at risk youth. There, Lonnie developed innovative pilot projects merging Arts and Academics, which were ultimately cited by, then, First Lady Hillary Clinton as a National Model for Arts Education.  

In 1996 Lonnie was commissioned to create the “African/American Garden Project.” which provided a physical and cultural exchange of disadvantaged urban single mothers in Pittsburgh, and farmers from Muguga, a small farming village in Kenya, to build a series of urban subsistence gardens.  

In 2005, Lonnie was cited as Artist of the Year in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and presented the Governor’s Award by Governor Edward Rendell. He served as a panel member for the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, DC. 

Lonnie is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts/Pew Charitable Trust Travel Grant for travel to Ghana and is a four time Pennsylvania Council for the Arts Fellowship recipient. His book “A Conversation with the World,” has been published by Datz press in Seoul, Korea. That project seeks to reveal our common humanity through interviews conducted by Lonnie with individuals through out the world. He recently delivered a TED talk on economic disparities of artists in modern culture. 

             Other exhibitions include an exhibition of photographs at Goethe Institute, Accra Ghana; an exhibition of collaborative portraiture in Christchurch, New Zealand, a group of works at Kulttuurivoimala, Culture Silo, Meri-Toppila, Oulu, Finland, a full scale reproduction of one of the educational galleries in the Barnes Foundation shown at La Maison de Etat-Unis, Paris, France, an exhibition of larger than life photographs at the Toyota City Museum in Aichi, Japan as well as a room sized installation featured at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Lonnie’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Addison Gallery for American Art in Andover, MA and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in Philadelphia, PA.

Sound and Vision is supported by the New York Studio School, where drawing, painting and sculpture are studied in depth, debated energetically, and created with passion. The School’s full-time programs: a two-year MFA and a three-year Certificate prioritize experimental learning and perception. Beginning in Fall 2021, the Studio School welcomes artists from around the world to join its inaugural Virtual Certificate Program. Combining the studio-centric emphasis of the School’s teaching methods with an individual, real-time approach to online learning, this full-time program is designed for serious artists, and dedicated aspiring artists, who seek to cultivate the studio skills and methods that will prepare them for a lifetime of art-making. The priority application deadline is April 30th, 2021 - apply online today at nyss.org