Jean Sousa

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Born in Boston and currently living in Chicago, Ms. Sousa has exhibited her work nationally and internationally and is the recipient of two Artist Fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council and a Regional Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Other awards include a Fellowship to the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Cliffdwellers Fellowship for Artist Residency at Ragdale and a Professional Artist in Residency at Oxbow in Saugatuck, Michigan. Ms. Sousa works primarily in photography with an earlier body of work in experimental film. Her work has been on exhibit at the Illinois State Museum Chicago Gallery, the Hunter Museum of American Art in Tennessee, the Chicago Cultural Center, and the Rockford Art Museum, and her films have been screened at the London Filmmakers Cooperative, Collectif Jeune Cinema in Paris, the Cinematheque in San Francisco, Millennium in New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago among other venues.



Ms. Sousa was formerly the Trott Family Director of Interpretive Exhibitions and Family Programs at the Art Institute of Chicago where she curated interactive exhibitions and was in charge of family and community programs. She is the author of "Faces, Places, & Inner Spaces," a book for young readers that was co-published by Abrams and the Art Institute of Chicago and reviewed by the New York Times Book Review. As a museum educator, she served as Chair and panelist at numerous national and international conferences including the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, and the National Gallery of Ireland. Ms. Sousa has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the MIT Summer Institute for Film, Photography, and Video at Hampshire College. She received her BFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.