Honorary Degrees

An-My Lê is an internationally renowned photographer primarily based in New York. As a teenager in 1975, however, Lê fled Vietnam with her family, and they eventually settled in the United States as refugees. Her work often addresses the impact of war on culture and on the environment, and she has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award. Her work has also been exhibited widely, including in the Whitney Biennial and Taipei Biennial as well as the Minneapolis Institute of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Tate Modern, London. Most recently, Between Two Rivers/Giữa hai giòng sông/Entre deux rivières, a 30-year survey of her career, including her forays into film, textiles, and installation was presented at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Lê is currently the Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts at Bard College, New York.

Sanford Biggers (MFA 1999) is a New York-based interdisciplinary conceptual artist who works in sculpture, painting, installation, textiles, sound, video, and performance. His work is an interplay of narrative, perspective, and history that speaks to current social, political, and economic happenings while examining the contexts that bore them. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including Morehouse College’s Bennie Trailblazer Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship, Heinz Award for the Arts, American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and the Rome Prize in Visual Arts; additionally he has been inducted into the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame and as a National Academician by the National Academy of Design. Biggers’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; as well as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among others. Biggers was also a Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Professor and Scholar in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Architecture and has served as an associate professor of Sculpture and New Genres of Visual Arts at Columbia University.