Howard Bossen is Professor Emeritus of Photography and Visual Communication in the School of Journalism at Michigan State University. He was the adjunct curator of photography at the Kresge Art Museum and the MSU Museum at Michigan State and was the guest curator for the exhibition Luke Swank: Modernist Photographer at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.

Bossen is the author of the books Henry Holmes Smith: Man of Light and Luke Swank: Modernist Photographer as well as many essays. He has been a reviewer for FotoFest’s biennial since 2008 and co-curated, with his son Colin, several exhibitions for FotoFest’s Participating Spaces program. These include Libuše Jarcovjáková: The Photographer as Dissident (2022), Wendel A. White’s Red Summer and Manifest (2024) and coming in 2026, Diana Matar’s My America.

Bossen was a Fulbright-Garcia Robles Senior Scholar in Mexico in 1994 and a distinguished visiting professor in the Center for the Arts in Society at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh in 2002. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. at The Ohio State University and his B.F.A. at Philadelphia College of Art. Bossen was on the faculty at Michigan State University for 43 years, and has taught classes at Glassel School of Art, Houston since 2023.