Carrie Mae Weems was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1953. Weems earned a BFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia (1981), and an MFA from the University of California, San Diego (1984), continuing her studies in the Graduate Program in Folklore at the University of California, Berkeley (1984–87). She rose to prominence with her “Kitchen Table Series” in the early 1990s, whose photographs depict the artist seated at her kitchen table and examine various tropes and stereotypes of African-American life.

Weems has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at major national and international museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Frist Center for Visual Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1998), the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York, (2014 retrospective) and the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville, Spain. She has also received honorary degrees from Colgate University (2007) and California College of the Arts (2001). Awards include the MacArthur ‘Genius’ Award (2013); Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2007); Skowhegan Medal for Photography (2007); Rome Prize Fellowship (2006); and the Pollack-Krasner Foundation Grant in Photography (2002); among others.

She is represented in public and private collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, NY and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Carrie Mae Weems lives and works in Syracuse, New York.