Elizabeth M. Webb

Elizabeth M. Webb is an artist and filmmaker whose work is invested in issues surrounding race and identity, often using the lens of her own family history of migration and racial passing to explore larger, systemic constructs and the renegotiation of their borders. She has screened and exhibited at venues including Viennale, BlackStar Film Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and her film Proximity Study (Sight Lines) won Best Experimental Short at the 2022 New Orleans Film Festival and the Marian McMahon Award at the 2023 Images Festival. Her work has been supported by the Ford Foundation (JustFilms), the Allan Sekula Social Documentary Award, and the Graham Foundation. Webb holds a dual MFA in Film/Video and Photo/Media from CalArts and is an alumna of the Whitney Independent Study Program, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. She is co-editor of Future/Present: Arts in a Changing America and was the 2024-2026 Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professor of Documentary Studies and American Studies at Duke and UNC.

Webb is currently working on her first feature documentary, Artificial Horizon, which borrows its title from a land surveying instrument that uses celestial reflections to create a horizon line when none is visible to the naked eye. The film traces the layered racial and ecological histories of a tract of former plantation land in eastern Alabama—an origin point for her family members who live on either side of, and sometimes cross, the color line. Drawing on plant life as a model of resilience and adaptation, the film asks: How might repair happen to land, to relationships, and to systems? 

This bio reflects the fellow’s work and affiliations as of their fellowship year.

• The Jule Museum Podcast: Elizabeth M. Webb and Joy Harjo: A podcast conversation on the connections between social histories, ecological landscapes, and creative practice.
• A Bearing Tree Is a Witness: A multimedia art exhibition at Gallery 44 featuring a video walkthrough, photographic documentation, and an essay examining land as both record and witness.`
• An Imaginary Grid: In Conversation with Elizabeth M. Webb: An interview for Public Parking with curator Magdalyn Asimakis exploring the ways power is inscribed onto land and bodies.
• Future/Present: Arts in a Changing America: An anthology from Duke University Press that advances the role of artists as innovative strategists for equity.