Christopher W Sims CV

Christopher Sims is the Director of the Duke Center for Documentary Studies. At Duke he is an Associate Professor of the Practice in the Sanford School of Public Policy and in the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies. He has also taught in the MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts program, the Duke-in-Berlin Summer Program, and in Graduate Liberal Studies. In 2024 he was a Research-in-Residence Fellow at the University of Passau and a Visiting Professor at the University of Regensburg, both in Germany. 

Sims’s monograph, “The Pretend Villages” was published by Kehrer Verlag in 2021 and work from this book has been shown in over 50 venues, including SF Camerawork, Cambridge University, the Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art, and the North Carolina Museum of Art. His project on Guantanamo Bay was featured in The Washington Post, the BBC World Service, Roll Call, and Flavorwire.

Sims has an undergraduate degree in history from Duke University, a master’s degree in visual communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a M.F.A. in studio art from the Maryland Institute College of Art. He worked as a photo archivist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and in communications for a number of non-profit organizations.

He was selected as the recipient of the Baum Award for Emerging American Photographers in 2010, chosen as one of the "new Superstars of Southern Art" by the Oxford American magazine in 2012, awarded the Arte Laguna Prize in Photographic Art in 2015, and named an Archie Green Fellow at the U.S. Library of Congress in 2017.