Teju Cole

Teju Cole is a photographer and writer who for the past twenty years has worked on problems of place, history, and personal freedom. His books—notable among them Open City , Blind Spot , and Fernweh —are published in twenty languages and his photography is widely exhibited and is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, and the Qatar Museums, among others. In 2017, he presented a solo performance at the Performa Biennial in New York City. He has been honored with the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and he has been a finalist for the Paris Photo/Aperture Foundation Photobook Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award (twice). Cole has delivered numerous invited lectures including the 2019 Berlin Family Lectures at the University of Chicago and the 2024 Clarendon Lectures in English at the University of Oxford. An elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he is currently the Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing in the English Department at Harvard University.