Jared Ragland is the Instructional Assistant Professor of Imaging Arts in the Department of Art & Art History at the University of Mississippi.
Biography
Jared Ragland (MFA, Tulane University) is a fine art and documentary photographer and former White House photo editor. His collaborative, socially conscious visual practice combines a range of photographic tactics with social science, historical, and literary research methodologies to critically confront issues of identity, marginalization, and the history of place. He currently serves on the faculty at the University of Mississippi as Instructional Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History and affiliate faculty at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture.
Jared is the photo editor of National Geographic Books’ “The President’s Photographer: Fifty Years Inside the Oval Office” and has worked on assignment for NGOs in the Balkans, the former Soviet Bloc, East Africa, and Haiti. Prior to joining the faculty at Ole Miss, Jared held teaching positions at Utah State University, The University of Alabama at Birmingham, and Corcoran College of Art + Design and served as the 2019 Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of South Florida’s Judy Genshaft Honors College.
Jared’s work has been exhibited around the world in more than 100 solo and group exhibitions, including recent shows at The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts (Montgomery, Ala.), Kimball Art Center (Park City, Utah), Texas Tech University (Lubbock, Texas), The Do Good Fund (Columbus, Ga.), Center for Photography at Woodstock (Kingston, N.Y.), Filter Photo (Chicago, Ill.), Candela (Richmond, Va.), Birmingham Museum of Art SHIFT space (Birmingham, Ala.), The National Geographic Society (Washington, D.C.), and the Royal Geographic Society (London, UK). His photographs have been featured by The New Yorker, New York Times, The Washington Post, Vanity Fair Italia, and The Oxford American, and his visual ethnographic research has been published in more than two dozen social science textbooks and high-impact academic journals, including the first photographs to ever be published in the flagship social sciences journal, Criminology. He is a 2020 Magnum Foundation grantee, 2020-21 Do Good Fund Artist-in-Residence, 2022 Aftermath Project Finalist, 2025 Brooklyn Darkroom Artist-in-Residence, and 2025 Center for Photographic Art Mid-Career grantee. In 2015, Jared was named one of TIME Magazine’s “Instagram Photographers to Follow in All 50 States.” His first film, “Some Million Miles,” (co-directed with Adam Forrester) has screened in festivals around the world and was distributed nationally by PBS. A forthcoming monograph co-authored with Sara J. Winston will be published by Oregon State University’s Composit Press in 2026.
During his tenure at the White House with the Bush (43) and Obama Administrations, Jared edited and designed photo books for the President, produced photographic exhibitions for the Leica Gallery New York, Leica Gallery Berlin, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, and he was part of the editing team responsible for the release of the iconic photographs of President Obama in the Situation Room during the raid on Osama bin Laden.
For more information, visit: https://jaredragland.com.
Courses Taught
- Art 381 Introduction to Photography
- Art 383 Intermediate Photography
- Art 483 Advanced Imaging Arts
- Art 490 Directed Individual Problems
- Art 491 Thesis
- Art 581 Black-and-White Photography
Education
B.A. Art, LaGrange College (2000)
MFA Art, Tulane University of Louisiana (2003)