Dawoud Bey is an American photographer and educator known for his large-scale art photography and street photography portraits, including American adolescents in relation to their community, and other often marginalized subjects. In 2017, Bey was named a fellow and the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and is regarded as one of the "most innovative and influential photographers of his generation".
Bey is a professor and Distinguished Artist at Columbia College Chicago. According to The New York Times, "in the seemingly simple gesture of photographing Black subjects in everyday life, [Bey, an African-American, ] helped to introduce Blackness in the context of fine art long before it was trendy, or even accepted"