Elizabeth M. Webb Named 2024-26 Lehman Brady Visiting Professor at Duke and UNC

Atlanta-based artist and filmmaker Elizabeth M. Webb has been selected for the two-year Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professorship at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and the Department of American Studies at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill.

Webb’s work explores issues surrounding race and identity, often using the lens of her family history of migration and racial passing to examine larger, systemic constructs. She has screened and exhibited her work at venues including the Vienna International Film Festival, BlackStar Film Festival, New Orleans Film Festival, Images Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Brooklyn Academy of Music, African American Museum in Philadelphia, Birmingham Museum of Art, and Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans.

During the first year of the Lehman Brady Professorship in 2024-25, Webb will make a series of week-long visits to engage with faculty, students and community groups, give presentations on work-in-progress and undertake planning for the second year.

In the 2025-26 academic year, Webb will be in residence to conduct research, participate in educational and community-building activities, and design and carry out a public engagement project connecting university staff, faculty, students and community participants. She will also teach courses at Duke and UNC and engage in presentations, outreach and other events for students and the public.

Webb holds a dual master of fine arts in film/video and photography/media from California Institute of the Arts and has completed residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Whitney Independent Study Program, and the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston.

Her film “Proximity Study (Sight Lines)” received awards at the 2022 New Orleans Film Festival and the 2023 Images Festival. Webb is currently working on her first feature-length film, “Artificial Horizon.” She is coeditor of the anthology “FUTURE/PRESENT: Arts in a Changing America” (Duke University Press, 2024).

The Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professorship is supported by two Duke endowment funds, one established by the Lyndhurst Foundation and the other by the bequest of Lehman Brady. The previous holder of the professorship is Marie T. Cochran, founder of the Affrilachian Artist Project.