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 entering 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.
Ms. Reed has been directing and producing documentary films since 1978 with her "If Only for an Hour", a one-hour documentary on American popular dance in the 1930s which was sponsored by the Lincoln Center Dance Archives and screened at Lincoln Center. She has also worked with Larry Reed to produce documentaries such as "The Shadow Master", a 1981 film seen on PBS that explored the generational conflict in contemporary Balinese life. In 2006, she debuted her much acclaimed documentary, My Eyes Were Fresh, about John Gutmann, a member of the German Jewish Diaspora, who became one of the seminal figures of 20th century photography. In her more recent film, Pirkle Jones: Seven Decades Photographed – from Pictorial California to the Politics of the Black Panther Party, Reed traces the history of Jones's dual achievements as a photographer of elegant landscape imagery and biting social documentarian. Both films have been 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; David Ireland—Skellig, an exhibition, artist’s book, and film at the Ansel Adams Center, San Francisco; a traveling exhibition of Imogene Cunningham—Paris in the Sixties.
In addition to organizing exhibitions, Reed has been a frequent editor and writer of many 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.
