12. New or Improved?

Shannon Perich is Curator of the Photographic History Collection at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Her publications include When the Circus Came to Town: An American Tradition in Photographs (Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2020), The Changing Face of Photography: Daguerreotype to Digital (Smithsonian, 2011) and Portrait of a Family: Richard Avedon's Photographs of the Kennedys (Harper Collins, 2007). Perich has curated and co-curated a number of exhibitions including the Smithsonian Institution's Traveling Exhibition Service's Billie Holiday at Sugar Hill: Photographs by Jerry Dantzic that is currently traveling. She has curated several exhibitions of Richard Avedon's photographs of the John F. Kennedy family for SITES and NMAH. Her exhibition Laughing Matters explored women and comedy. She co-curated Country: Portrait of a Sound at the Annenberg Center for Photography in Los Angeles with curators from the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. Perich has taught history of photography at Maryland Institute College of Art. Her blogs can be found on the NMAH and NPR websites. Perich is the project director and co-content manager for Stories of 2020, a story-gathering and archiving website for NMAH. Her photography research and collecting interests are broad, building upon the history of the medium and intersections with national narratives to explore how we can better see and understand history.