For thirteen years, Dr. Carol McCusker has been the Curator of Photography at the Harn Museum of Art at the University of Florida, Gainesville, where she has curated twenty-nine exhibitions. Standouts are Aftermath: The Fallout of War in response to the 2014 Syrian civil war (it won a National Endowment for the Arts grant and Warhol Foundation Award), and Shadow to Substance, co-curated with Professor Porchia Moore, in response to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Before arriving in Florida, McCusker was Curator at the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego for nine years where she curated or oversaw over forty-five exhibitions and wrote a roster of essays for numerous artists’ catalogues. She was also Adjunct Professor at the University of San Diego and the University of California, San Diego and staff writer for Color and Bl & Wh magazines.
McCusker received her B.F.A. in studio art and art history at Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in art history with an emphasis on the history of photography at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. McCusker received the Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship Award, the Beaumont Newhall Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Awards and the Ansel Adams Award from the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson.
In 2009, she was invited to curate at the Lishui Photo Festival in China where her exhibition of photographs by L.A. photographer, Stephen Berkman, won the festival’s First Prize. She was Juror for the prestigious International Center of Photography Infinity Award/New York, 2010. And has juried the Clarence John Laughlin Award for the New Orleans Photo Alliance, and reviewed portfolios for the Griffin Museum of Photography, FotoFest/Houston, Palm Springs Photo Fest, Critical Mass/Portland and Atlanta Celebrates Photography, where meeting new and mid-career photographers has been essential to her exhibitions and professional growth.
Writing, teaching and curating from photography’s complete history defines McCusker’s enthusiasm for the medium’s inspiring creative range and ever-changing technology from William Henry Fox Talbot’s 1840s calotypes to cellphone videos and AI imagery.
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