Lewis Watts

Lewis Watts is a photographer and professor of art at the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a long-standing interest in African American history in the Bay Area and nationally. His parents’ southern background enlightens much of his research into the great migration from the rural South to the urban North.Lewis began photographing the Fillmore in the early 1990s, and put together the archival photographs for the Fillmore Center’s Fillmore Historical Panel Project.

Lewis’s photographs are part of the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Oakland Museum of California, The Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, and Light Work, Syracuse, New York. He holds his BA in Political Science and his MA in Photography and Design from the University of California, Berkeley. Watts participated in Light Work’s Artist-in-Residence Program in 1996.

Courtesy of Light Work