Elizabeth Allen

Allen is a curator, educator, artist and activist. As the curator of photography at Northlight Gallery at Arizona State University for the last 23 years, Allen demonstrates her profound interest in understanding, interpreting, and teaching the richness of photography as an evolving medium to an expanding community. The mission of the gallery under her direction has developed a dialog between established, emerging and underrepresented artists working in a broad spectrum of photo-based media in collaboration with scholars also interested in challenging our perceptions of the human experience.

By creating space for dialog between artists long accepted in the photographic canon with diverse voices of contemporary BIPOC and women artists, Allen troubles the canon in a way that challenges calcified notions of authority, representation and power. Recent curated exhibitions featured works by Richard Avedon, Linda Connor, Edward S. Curtis, Roger Fenton, Aaron Siskind, Edward Weston, and Garry Winogrand from the Northlight Gallery and Solari Foundation collections with artworks by Sama Alshaibi, Miguel A. Aragón, Kwame Brathwaite, Averian Chee, Wen Hang Lin, Tomiko Jones, Stephen Marc, Doug Miles Sr., Stephan Ruiz, Wendy Red Star, and the Humaize the Numbers Collective working to reform the criminal justice system.

In her creative practice, Allen delves deep into issues of human connection, grief and addiction, exploring relationships and the human psyche through metaphor and storytelling. She utilizes a combination of historical photographic processes with 21st-century digital technology as a conceptual foundation for the striking portraits and multimedia installations she creates.

Allen has held leadership positions in the Society for Photographic Education since becoming a member in 2001. She served as the Chair of the Women's Caucus for over a decade and was elected to the SPE Board of Directors in 2016 and 2020. Allen served as the Chair of the Board of Directors in 2019-2020 and represented the organization at the 2019 Pingyao International Photography Festival in China and the joint SPE and Murthy/Nayak South Asia Photography Symposium in Dehli, India in 2020.

She currently serves on the Advisory Council to the Joshua Tree Center for Photographic Arts.

Education