About Susan Ressler

"Ressler has demonstrated her ability to merge the feminist critique of the female body with a broader critique of the body politic. In many ways, the images produced with the computer return to the ideas of Ressler's first works: the minority cultures within the majority; the role of the corporate versus the individual character... she balances the personal and the societal, the artistic and the political, an act which renders the works both beautiful and powerful."
Marian Hollinger, art historian

Susan Ressler has been making photographs for nearly 40 years, and her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally since the mid-1970s. She is also an author and educator, having edited the book Women Artists of the American West (McFarland, 2003) and taught at Purdue University from 1981-2004, where she is now Professor Emerita.

Ressler chronicled the lives of Canada's First Nations while a research photographer for the University of Montreal (1972) and The National Museum of Man, Ottawa (1973). She then studied photography and the history of photography at the University of New Mexico, where she received an M.A.(1977) and an M.F.A. with distinction (1988). Her undergraduate studies were in English Literature at the University of Pittsburgh (B.A. summa cum laude, 1971).

Susan first developed a love for New Mexico in 1973, while working as a reporter/photographer for The Gallup Independent, then the state's largest weekly newspaper. She began her teaching career in 1978 in Ohio at the University of Akron and Cuyahoga Community College, followed by positions at Cerritos and Golden West colleges in California. In 1980, she taught photography in the journalism department at Idaho State University, Pocatello. In 1981, she joined the faculty at Purdue University where she was Professor of Photography through 2004 and pioneered distance learning in the visual arts. (See Women Artists of the American West.)

Susan is widely exhibited and published, with over 100 exhibitions from 1976 to the present. Recent publications of her artwork include the Spring 2005 issue of Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies and Gender Issues (pp. 173-175, 179), and the fourth edition of Exploring Color Photography: From the Darkroom to the Digital Studio (by Robert Hirsch).

Susan Ressler's artworks are in the collections of the Library of Congress and Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.; the former National Museum of Man, Ottawa, Canada; and many university art museums, including that of the University of New Mexico. Her awards include two National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowships (1979 and 1983), First Place in the Society for Contemporary Photography competition (Kansas City, MO 1992), and in 2005 she was a finalist for the Willard Van Dyke Memorial Award, a prestigious competition open to photographers in New Mexico.