ann fessler
Ann Fessler is the author of the bestselling The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade. Fessler is also a specialist in video and audio installation art and is a professor of photography at the Rhode Island School of Design. Fessler’s work addresses the gap between lived history and recorded history from a feminist perspective. She is especially known for her work dealing with adoption and the experience of birthmothers.
Raised as an adopted child in a small town outside of Toledo, Ohio, Fessler always wondered about her birthmother, but never attempted to make contact until later in life. Between receiving her original birth certificate and being reunited with her birthmother fourteen years later, Fessler delved into the subject of adoption through her visual exhibitions and writing. Her joint audio and video installation exhibitions, “Everlasting” and “Close to Home,” told the stories of women who had given up their children for adoption as well as her own journey to her birthmother’s hometown. The Girls Who Went Away grew out of these two exhibitions. Completed with the help of a 2003-2004 Radcliffe Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, it tells the heartbreaking stories of unmarried women who were coerced into placing their children for adoption, both by their families and a society that insisted single women could not be good mothers.
The Girls Who Went Away was called “wrenching, riveting” by the Chicago Tribune and “a blend of deeply moving personal tales bolstered by solid sociological analysis—journalism of the first order” by the San Francisco Chronicle. Since its publication in May of 2006, Fessler has appeared on over forty television and radio programs, including Good Morning America, National Public Radio’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and The Diane Rehm Show.
Fessler speaks on visual art and social justice, gives audio presentations, and gives book talks on The Girls Who Went Away. Her presentations cross disciplines of art, sociology, and feminism, and can be tailored to any or all of these audiences. A prominent artist who has been exhibited at college art museums and galleries across the country and within the collections of the MoMA, Whitney, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, she brings a spark of creativity and humanity to her political and feminist work.
For more speakers on feminist art, see: Sheryl Oring, Guerilla Girls, Periel Aschenbrand
For more speakers on reproductive justice, see: Loretta Ross, Amy Richards, Gloria Feldt, Wyndi Anderson, Katha Pollitt, Gloria Steinem, Jennifer Baumgardner, Third Wave Foundation
