Jane Reed

Jane Levy Reed is a photographer, filmmaker, curator and historian. She graduated from Boston University in 1969, where she concurrently studied with Minor White at M.I.T. before coming to the San Francisco Art Institute in 1970 to continue her graduate studies in photography and film.

She taught visual anthropology at San Francisco State University in the late 1970’s and has been curating photography exhibitions both nationally and internationally ever since. For the last decade Ms. Reed has been directing and producing documentary films. One of her most recent films was “Pirkle Jones: Seven Decades Photographed – From Pictorial California to the Politics of the Black Panther Party”. In 2006, Reed debuted her documentary on photographer John Guttman which was received with much acclaim and featured in many festivals both nationally and internationally. Among the exhibitions she has curated are David Byrne—Anima Mundi, San Francisco; Richard Barnes—Still Rooms and Excavations at San Francisco Camerawork; Josef Sudek—Poet of Prague at the Nikon Galleries in Tokyo and Osaka; L’esprit Metis, a traveling exhibition of eleven contemporary French documentary photographers; and David Ireland—Skellig, an exhibition, artist’s book, and film at the Ansel Adams Center, San Francisco. 

In addition to organizing exhibitions, Reed has been a frequent editor of Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts, and numerous other international photography journals. Ms. Reed was Chair of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s FotoForum and is presently on the Museum’s photography accessions committee. She continues to serve on numerous boards, including the Roxie Theater, the Heritage Foundation, and the Larry Sultan Visiting Artist Program.