Judith Joy Ross

Judith Joy Ross studied at IIT Institute of Design and Moore College of Art and Design. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is portrait photography. Work by Judith Joy Ross is recorded in the collections of Art Institute of Chicago, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, National Gallery of Canada, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Museum of Modern Art. Distinctions recorded are Guggenheim Fellowship and Anonymous Was A Woman Award.

• Name — Judith Joy Ross • Born — 1946

Ross was born in Hazleton, Pennsylvania in 1946. She graduated from the Moore College of Art in 1968 and earned a master's degree in photography in 1970 from the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where she studied with Aaron Siskind.

Since the early 1980s, Ross has photographed a cross-section of the American population, especially people in eastern Pennsylvania where she was born and raised. Ross uses an 8×10 inch view camera mounted on a tripod and her portraits are made on printing out paper by contact, a process by which a print is made by placing a negative directly onto photographic paper, and then exposing it to sunlight for a few minutes to a few hours. Her photographic antecedents include the German August Sander and the American Diane Arbus. Her series include pictures of children at Eurana Park in Weatherly, Pennsylvania (1982), visitors to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. (1983–1984), members of the United States Congress and their aides in their Washington offices (1986–1987), laborers, people at shopping malls, and children at play near her home in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She has also photographed immigrants in New York City and Paris, and was commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to photograph tech workers in Silicon Valley, California. One of her major projects, pictures made from 1992 to 1994 in Hazleton public schools she had attended in the 1950s and 1960s, was published by the Yale University Art Gallery in 2006 as Portraits of the Hazleton Public Schools. Ross has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1985), a city of Easton, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Grant (1988), the Charles Pratt Memorial Award of $25,000 (1992), and the Andrea Frank Foundation Award (1998). Monographs and exhibition catalogs of her work have been published internationally. John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art in New York selected Ross' work for the first exhibition in the New Photography series. In 2011, Die Photographische Sammlung in Cologne organized a retrospective exhibition of Ross's work which traveled to the Kunstmuseum Kloster in Madeburg and the Foundation A Stichting, Brussels. In 2023, the Philadelphia Museum of Art exhibited her work in Judith Joy Ross, which featured approximately 200 of her photographs.

Ross' work is held in the following public collections: • Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: 5 prints (as of June 2018) • Museum of Modern Art, New York: 55 prints (as of June 2018) • San Francisco Museum of Modern Art • Museum of Fine Arts, Houston • National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa • Die Photographische Sammlung, Cologne • The Pilara Foundation Collection, Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco • Victoria and Albert Museum, London: 4 prints (as of June 2018) • Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.