LaCharles Ward, Ph.D., is Chief Curator of Photography and Film and Director of the Earl W. and Amanda Stafford Center for African American Media Arts (CAAMA) at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Dr. Ward is a cultural theorist of photography and scholar of Black visual culture, which includes film, video, and media arts across the Black diaspora. His writings on photography, legal history, and Black people’s relationship to law have appeared in museum catalogues and journals such as Black Camera and the History of Photography. Prior to the Smithsonian, Dr. Ward was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA. He received his PhD from Northwestern University (Evanston, IL) in 2019. He is the editor of Double Exposure, which is the National Museum of African American History and Culture book series dedicated to photography.
