Co-founder of FotoFest International in Houston during 1983-1983, Wendy Watriss has worked internationally as a photographer, writer, curator, newspaper reporter, and producer of television documentaries from 1965-2026. From 1991 to 2016, she was FotoFest’s artistic and publications director, curating and organizing more than sixty international exhibitions on photography and mixed media art. For FotoFest 1992, Watriss conceived and produced the award-winning book, Image and Memory: Photography from Latin America, 1866-1994, published by the University of Texas in Austin and subsequently three other FotoFest books, as well as eleven FotoFest Biennial catalogues. The individual and collective photographs by Frederick Baldwin and Wendy Watriss are featured in the books Looking at the U.S. 1957-1986 (Mets & Schilt Publishing, Amsterdam) and Coming to Terms: The German Hill Country of Texas (Texas A&M Press, College Station, TX).

As a freelance documentary photographer, Watriss’ individual work and photo documentary essays have been published worldwide in The Smithsonian, LIFE, Newsweek, The New York Times, GEO, Stern, Time and the Texas Observer among many other publications. In 1982, she won first place awards from World Press and the Oskar Barnack Leica Prize for her photo documentation of the effects of Agent Orange on U.S. veterans of the Vietnam War. Watriss has received artist fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. With Fred Baldwin, she co-founded and managed FotoFest International as a platform for art and ideas to create new career opportunities for photographic journalists and artists in the U.S. and throughout the world. Watriss and Baldwin have received awards for their visionary work in photography by the Society for Photographic Education (SPE), the American Society Media Photographers (ASMP), and the Woodstock Center for Photography, N.Y.

Photographs by Wendy Watriss and Frederick Baldwin are in the archives of The Menil Collection, Houston; Bibliothéque nationale de France, Paris; Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Charleroi Museum of Photography, Belgium , the Dolph Briscoe Center for the Study of American History and the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin. Their individual and collective archives are going to the Dolph Briscoe Center.

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