Michal Raz-Russo is an American photography curator and writer whose practice links the visual language of the lens with broader social, political, and cultural histories. She currently serves as Programs Director at The Gordon Parks Foundation, having previously held the position of David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg Associate Curator of Photography and Media at the Art Institute of Chicago. Her career has been defined by an engagement with documentary traditions, social justice, and the work of photographers who used their cameras as instruments of witness and change.

Raz-Russo approaches curation less as a celebration of isolated images than as a contextualization of photographs within the environments that shaped them. She has emphasized how photographers document cities in transformation, exploring the ways in which urban spaces reflect broader societal currents. Her methodology is to bring together archival material, filmmakers, and photographers to create layered narratives that foreground the relationship between image-making and lived experience. This sets her apart from peers who prioritize aesthetic formalism or market-oriented curation, as her focus is consistently on how photographic records function as evidence and as art simultaneously.

Among her notable bodies of work is the digital publication that grew out of a project illuminating the photographers and filmmakers who documented Chicago during a period of intense cultural, social, and political change. This project, supported by the Art Institute, assembled a broad range of voices to trace how the city became a stage for national events. More recently, as editor of Gordon Parks Foundation/Steidl Book Prize publications, she has helped shape the presentation of Park’s legacy, bringing the work of a pivotal American photographer to new audiences through rigorously produced books that pair high-quality printing with careful editorial sequencing.

Raz-Russo’s significance lies in her dual engagement with institutional scholarship and public programming. During her tenure at the Art Institute of Chicago, she played a role in expanding the photography collection’s public narrative and contributed to exhibitions that drew on the museum’s holdings. Her stewardship at The Gordon Parks Foundation has been essential in sustaining the visibility of Parks’s oeuvre—a body of work that repositioned photojournalism as a tool for civil rights advocacy and humanist storytelling. By editing prize publications and co-producing exhibitions, she has fostered a critical reassessment of Parks’s contributions while also championing emerging photographers.

For photobook collectors, Raz-Russo’s editorial work with Steidl offers a compelling entry point. The Gordon Parks Foundation/Steidl editions are notable for their faithfulness to the artist’s intentions, often incorporating previously unpublished images and well-documented essays. Her attention to sequence and print quality aligns with the traditions of fine photobook production, making these volumes both scholarly resources and aesthetic objects. Collectors interested in the intersection of social documentary and photobook artistry will find her projects to be benchmark examples of curatorial rigor applied to photographic publishing.

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