Martha A. Strawn course materials

Martha A. Strawn was born in Washington, DC in 1945 and grew up in Lake Wales, Florida. She earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Art from the Florida State University, and later earned an MFA from Ohio University. She also attended the Brooks Institute of Photography and the Florida State Graduate School of Asian Art History in Japan. Her career has concentrated on the use of photography to document the human landscape. In 1973 she co-founded a non-profit arts organization that later became known as The Light Factory. She also was a co-founder of the Center for American Places, a non-profit organization whose mission is to “enhance the public's understanding of, appreciation for, and affection for the places of America—whether urban, suburban, rural, or wild.” Among her other accomplishments is an exhibit entitled “Threshold: Mazes, Mysticism and Female Principle in India.” This was a work eleven years in the making, which documented Indian women who made diagrams of thresholds. The exhibit earned Strawn a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1980, as well as a Fulbright Fellowship in 1984. From 1971, she was a professor of art at the University of North Carolina Charlotte, where she taught a course entitled “The Photograph as a Document.” She retired in December of 2006 and returned to Florida.