Charlee Brodsky

CHARLEE BRODSKY is a fine art and documentary photographer who exhibits her work nationally. She is a professor of photography at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Brodsky describes her work as dealing with human issues and beauty through everyday tales of life. She was compelled to produce this unusual, beautiful book by her own experience as the mother of a child with bipolar disorder.

Brodsky has collaborated on several illustrated books with poets, anthropologists and writers on subjects ranging from mental illness to industrial blight. Among her projects, her book Street, with Poet Jim Daniels, won the 2007 Tillie Olsen Award given by Working Class Studies Association. In 2001, she and three others won an Emmy for their work on Stephanie, the story of her friend Stephanie Byram’s life with breast cancer. Brodsky worked with Byram to produce the book Knowing Stephanie, which was one of the American Association of University Presses’ outstanding illustrated books of 2004. Also, with anthropologist Judith Modell Schacter, Brodsky explored Homestead, a former steel mill town. This work resulted in the book A Town Without Steel: Envisioning Homestead.