Bruce Jackson

SUNY Distinguished Professor and James Agee Professor of American Culture

Bruce Jackson is an American folklorist, documentary filmmaker, writer, photographer. He is SUNY Distinguished Professor and the James Agee Professor of American Culture at the UB. Jackson has edited or authored more than 30 books. He has also, in collaboration with SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor Diane Christian, directed and produced five documentary films. For 16 years, he and Christian have presented the popular Buffalo Film Seminars, a film series open to UB students and the general public. Jackson has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1971), was nominated for a Grammy Award (1974), named an Associate Member of the Folklore Fellows by the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters (1995), and Chevalier in l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government (2002). In 2012, the president of France appointed him chevalier in the National Order of Merit.

His photographs mainly focus on prison life. A photo collection from the Cummins Unit in Arkansas was exhibited at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Other recent exhibitions are Being There (Burchfield Penney Art Center, 2012), Portraits from a Prison (Arkansas Studies Institute, 2009), American Gulag (Lega di Cultura di Piadena and Circolo Gianni Bosio, Rome, 2007), Bridging Buffalo (Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society, 2006–2007), and Mirrors (Nina Freudenheim Gallery, 2004).