Leigh Raiford (born 1972, New York) is Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches, researches, curates and writes about race, gender, justice and visuality. At Berkeley, Raiford is also Co-Director and co-Principal Investigator with Tianna S. Paschel of the Black Studies Collaboratory, an ongoing initiative to amplify the world-building work of Black Studies funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the San Francisco Foundation. Raiford’s research has been supported by the Fulbright Foundation, Volkswagen Foundation (Germany), American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Academy in Berlin, among others.
Raiford is the author of Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (UNC Press, 2011); Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography co-conceived with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas and Laura Wexler (Thames and Hudson, 2024; Delpire &Co [French translation], 2023); co-editor with Heike Raphael-Hernandez of Migrating the Black Body: Visual Culture and the African Diaspora (UW Press, 2017); and co-editor with Renee Romano of The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (UGA Press, 2006). Her most recent book, When Home is a Photograph: Blackness and Belonging in the World is forthcoming from Duke UP (Spring 2026). Raiford is Series Editor with Sarah Elizabeth Lewis and Deborah Willis of Vision and Justice, a new imprint of Aperture Books. Raiford’s work has appeared in academic journals including Art Journal, American Quarterly, Small Axe, and NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art; and popular venues including Artforum, Aperture, Hyperallergic, and Atlantic.com. Raiford has written essays about the work of a number of contemporary Black artists, including LaToya Ruby Frazier, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Lava Thomas, Mildred Howard, and Dawoud Bey. Among her curatorial endeavors are the co-curated group exhibitions Plumb Line: Charles White and the Contemporary at the California African American Museum, Los Angeles (with Essence Harden) and About Things Loved: Blackness and Belonging at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive.
Raiford was a contributing author to LaToya Ruby Frazier: Flint is Family in Three Acts (Gordon Parks Foundation/Steidl Book Prize, 2022), and the forthcoming Gordon Parks: Diary of A Harlem Family, 1967/1968.
Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle, Leigh Raiford (UNC Press, 2011)
Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, Leigh Raiford, and Laura Wexler (Thames and Hudson, 2024)
Migrating the Black Body: Visual Culture and the African Diaspora, Leigh Raiford and Heike Raphael-Hernandez, co-editors (UW Press, 2017)
The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory, Leigh Raiford and Renee Romano, co-editors (UGA Press, 2006)
