Zun Lee

Zun Lee is an award-winning Canadian photographer, physician and educator. He was born and raised in Germany and has also lived in Atlanta, Philadelphia and Chicago. He is a 2018 Knight Foundation Grantee, 2017 Art Gallery of Ontario Artist in Residence, and a 2015 Magnum Foundation Fellow. He currently resides in Toronto.

Lee has been globally recognized as one of the top emerging visual storytellers to watch. His focus on quotidian Black life has led to publications and mentions in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, TIME, The New Yorker, Huffington Post, MSNBC, Washington Post, Forbes, and Smithsonian Magazine.

For his project Father Figure: Exploring Alternate Notions of Black Fatherhood, photographer Zun Lee embedded himself in the lives of African-descended families across the US and Canada. By focusing on intimate moments of everyday family life, Lee interrogates Black father absence stereotypes and situates them in a broader context of pathologized black masculinity. The resulting monograph, produced by acclaimed publisher CeibaFoto, has won several major international awards. 

In the fall of 2014, Lee worked on repeated assignments in Ferguson, Missouri, where he engaged the local community to produce a more nuanced narrative of resistance. His archival project Fade Resistance examines a gap in the recent history of Black visual representation through a collection of over 3,500 found Polaroids of African American families. Produced from the 1970s to the early 2000s, these photographs illuminate how Black communities codified their own lives to generate meaning and belonging. The fact that the original families no longer own these images brings into focus a sociopolitical dynamic of Black dispossession and dislocation that looms over the archive as a whole.

Lee has shown his work in various solo and group exhibits in North America and Europe. He has spoken publicly at Portland Art Museum, University of Chicago, Ryerson University, University of Toronto, Annenberg Space for Photography, International Center of Photography, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Columbia University, and Duke University.