Ethan Levitas is an American artist. He is self-taught, and his medium is the Photograph.
His practice is rooted in the observational and advanced through the contextualization of moments when the concrete and the metaphoric intersect and coalesce. This is fertile and distinct territory—- the marrow of the medium—- that combines the socio-cultural, political, aesthetic and the personal.
Levitas’ photographs are exhibited and collected internationally, including presentations at the National Portrait Gallery (UK), the Rencontres d’Arles Photographie (France), and the New York Public Library, which holds an extensive archive of Levitas’s work in its permanent collection. He has been awarded the Aaron Siskind Fellowship, the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship, and the Kittredge Fellowship, as well as multi-year project grants from the Japan-United States Friendship Commission and the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership. In 2009, Levitas was shortlisted for the Cartier-Bresson Prize.
Levitas has lived and lectured extensively in Japan, where he created and directed a pioneering art-in-education program for Japanese senior high schools, and in 2002 he published the program as a photo-based monograph textbook, Outside and In: Conversations about Identity , which has been used as a primary teaching material in international studies curricula throughout Japan.
Born and based in New York City, he is a graduate of Cornell University.