Shelby Graham retired in 2021 as the Director/Curator of the Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) after serving for 22 years. She has collaborated on exhibition projects with the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, the Museum of Art and History in Santa Cruz, CA; the San Jose Museum of Art; Gallery Ef in Tokyo, Japan; galleries in Tenerife, Canary Islands; The Center for Photographic Art, in Carmel, CA; and the Craft & Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles, CA. She has taught courses in photography, contemporary art and museum practices at the University of California, Santa Cruz and at San Jose State University; Cabrillo College; and Seinan Gakuin University in Kyushu, Japan. A selection of her curatorial works include: Unique Multiples: Teaching with the Parkett Collection, 2019; Mary Porter Sesnon and Pino Alto, 2018; Forms of Resistance, 2018; The Gail Project: An Okinawan American Dialogue, 2017; Raymond Saunders: Black is a Color, 2015; Tom Franco: Co-Lab, 2015; Alternative Lineage, 2014; The Dinner Parties: art and agriculture; The Harrison Studio: On Mixing, Mapping and Territory, 2013; Katerina Lanfranco: Natural Selection, 2012, Lewis Watts: New Orleans Suite, 2012; Xiaoze Xie: Resistant Archeology, 2011; Some Assembly Required: race, gender and globalization, 2009–2010; Interruptions of Hierarchies, 2008; Image as Object, 2006; Hank Willis Thomas: Signifying Blackness, 2006; and The Rhetoric of the Pose: Rethinking Hannah Wilke, 2005; Binh Danh, Immortality, The Remnants of the Vietnam and American War, 2002. See her curatorial page for more details.
Shelby Graham has a 35-year career as an educator and conceptual photographer, including solo and group exhibitions in the United States from California to Philadelphia and international exhibitions in Japan and the Czech Republic. Graham earned her MFA in photography from San Jose State University and specializes in alternative and experimental photography with innovative curatorial praxis. She was on the Board of Trustees at the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel from 2015-2018 and has collaborated on several exhibitions with the Institute of the Arts and Sciences and many faculty members at UC Santa Cruz. She works as s guest curator for the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History (2024) and the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art for 2022-2024. See her curatorial page for more details.
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