Susan Worsham

Susan Worsham grew up in Richmond, Virginia. Her childhood field trips were to cigarette factories and Civil War battlegrounds, with a brown bag lunch in tow. As a young girl Worsham could often be found holding a Dixie cup full of Kool-Aid powder, with a few drops of water, making a sweet sugary paste for finger dipping. Her childhood travels were spent wandering different neighborhoods on her Schwinn and knocking on strangers’ doors with those same sticky fingers. Her work is both poetic and deeply personal, drawing inspiration in equal parts from the artist’s memories of family, from the Southern landscape, and from the commingled confusion of sadness and beauty. Named one of the Oxford American’s “New Superstars of Southern Art,” her work has been widely exhibited in the United States, as well as internationally, and is held in private and public collections including the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Do Good Fund Southern Photography Initiative. She was recently nominated for the 2016 Baum Award for an Emerging American Photographer, one of the largest national awards among the grants and fellowships available in photography. Her website is susanworsham.net.