Joanne Leonard, an accomplished scholar and influential visual artist, will deliver a presentation titled, “Being in Pictures” March 29 as part of her Distinguished University Professor designation, one of U-M’s highest faculty honors.

Leonard, the Diane M. Kirkpatrick and Griselda Pollock Distinguished University Professor of Art and Women’s Studies, is the first faculty member from A&D to receive the award. She is one of four individuals to be honored this year.

Her lecture will be at 4 p.m. in the Rackham Amphitheatre. The event is free and open to the public.

Leonard, who often injects themes related to social issues into her artwork, will discuss the way things in the public sphere have stimulated, provoked or even enabled her work as a photographer. She is considered by colleagues as a major thinker within her practice and beyond in the larger field of women’s studies and visual culture.

“It was in the decade of the ’90s that I became especially interested in how to push photographs toward story telling,” she says. “The photograph itself has anti-narrative qualities. It is a bordered, artificial cut out of the flow of time. Thus, it’s very difficult for a photograph to tell its own story.”

Her most extended exploration of both narrative and form lives in the more than 60 works she made for “Not Losing her Memory: Stories in Photographs, Words and Collage,” an exhibition mounted just after her mother’s death from Alzheimer’s disease.

Using photo collage and text to create visually, Leonard says the exhibition was about “the steps between past and present, grandmothers and grandchildren, wealth and lesser circumstances, and giving back voice to photographs that have, traditionally, both stereotyped and silenced women.”

Leonard also is known for her groundbreaking work using photo collage, which combines text, visual images and technology.

She also will discuss twins—a major theme in her family, which has four sets of twins. Leonard is an identical twin. In a work she titles simply “Twins,” the artist will discuss her mixing of twin themes with actions from the everyday and the horrific to actions of applauding, filming, separating and annihilating in the mix of private and public.

Leonard has received numerous grants and international awards and residencies, including grants from the National Endowment of the Arts (1975 and 1998), the Michigan Council for the Arts Award (1989), and a residency as a visiting artist and scholar at the American Academy in Rome (2004). In addition, she received the prestigious John H. D’Arms Faculty Award for Distinguished Graduate Mentoring in the Humanities in 2002.

The U-M Press will publish a collection of Leonard’s photographs and collages with supplemental text and commentary by the artist in 2006.