Art @ the Center: Emily Rena Williams

Celebrating Southern Cultures’s Religion issue with featured photographer and UNC doctoral student Emily Rena Williams. Her series “Infinite Poem” explores identity and place in small Jewish communities in the Deep South. Historian Shari Rabin, guest editor of the Religion issue, will offer remarks. Refreshments provided.

Cosponsored by the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies

Emily Rena Williams is an artist and educator interested in investigating communal and individual memory, identity, and placemaking through photography, writing, and audio. She holds a BA in fine arts and history from Haverford College and an MFA in photography from Louisiana State University. After earning her MFA, she served as a curatorial fellow at The Do Good Fund in Columbus, Georgia. Emily is currently a second year in the American Studies PhD program at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, where she is a Tau Epsilon Phi Fellow at the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies. Her work, We had to know who we were; We had to know who we weren’t, documents Jewish communities past and present in the rural and small-town Deep South through photography and oral history interviews.