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Jennifer Williams

Adjunct Instructor and Photography Technician

Jennifer Williams holds an MFA from Goldsmiths College in London and a BFA from The Cooper Union in New York City. Born and raised in rural SW Pennsylvania, Williams moved to New York to 1990. Over the last twenty years, she has made the visual exploration of New York a central theme in her installation, collage, and photographic work. By documenting, deconstructing, and re-composing visual elements of the city, Williams gives form to dissonance within the urban geography. At its core her work is an amalgamation of traditional photographic languages and a syntax belonging to the twentieth-century sculptural tradition.

Notable solo and two person shows include: A.I.R. Gallery, The Homefront Gallery, and La Mama Gallery, Brown University, and Silvereye Center for Photography.  Large scale works have been featured at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, the DUMBO Arts Festival, the HOWL! Festival, the Affordable Art Fair in New York, and The Icebox @ Crane Arts.  Williams is currently a 2011-2013 Center for Emerging Visual Artists (CFEVA) Fellow, and was a 2008-2009 A.I.R. Gallery Fellow. Williams has held residencies at The Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY and The Vermont Studio Center.  Her work has been featured in Construction Literary Magazine, The New Yorker Photo Blog, Afterimage Magazine, Photographic Quarterly, and the book A Stuck Up Piece of Crap: A Selected History of Stickers (Rizzoli). She was recently awarded a NARS Foundation International Artist Residency Program Studio in Brooklyn, NY for the Fall 2011 season.  Several large-scale works have been acquired by the West Collection. Upcoming group shows include the NARS Gallery and Mt. Airy Contemporary, as well as a solo show at CFEVA in 2012.

Williams currently teaches Photography 1 at The Cooper Union and is an Adjunct Professor of Art at City College in New York City. She was a Fall 2009 - Spring 2011 Visiting Assistant Professor in Visual Art at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and has also taught at Queens College in Queens, NY.

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.