ABOUT

Ann E. Zelle, born in 1943, grew up in Springfield, Illinois. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College and earned a Master’s Degree in Sculpture in Florence, Italy. She was a museum administrator and educator from 1963-l973 at the Illinois State Museum, Newark Museum (NJ), Museum of Contemporary Art and ART & SOUL (Chicago), and the International Council of Museums (UNESCO). She worked for the Polaroid Education Program and taught at Northern Virginia Community College and the Smithsonian Institution. She is Associate Professor Emerita at American University School of Communication, where she was Head of Photography from 1982-2002.

Living in Washington, DC, from Nixon through G.W.Bush, she worked as a photojournalist recording political and social life of the nation’s capital. Her work has been exhibited in national museums, galleries and published in books, newspapers, and magazines. You can find some of her work on Gettyimages.com.

In 2007 she relocated to Western North Carolina, where she returned to welded and ceramic sculpture. During the pandemic she began making ceramic tiles with “Signs of the Times,” short messages reflecting moments in current social and political history. They are a form of journalism which records in a medium more durable than paper or digital bites the fleeting moments and values in early twenty-first century America. Her work was exhibited in 2023 at Dot Editions Fine Art establishment in Asheville, NC.