American, born Cuba 1948, lives in Brookline, MA
Photographer Abelardo Morell immigrated to the United States as a teen in 1962, completing his undergraduate degree at Bowdoin College in 1977 and his MFA in 1981 at the Yale University School of Art. Morell has exhibited his work extensively, and in 2013 the Art Institute of Chicago organized his retrospective, Abelardo Morell: The Universe Next Door, which traveled to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.
Major exhibitions of the artist’s work have been presented at the Yale University Art Gallery (2008); the Detroit Institute of the Arts (2001); the St. Louis Art Museum (2000); the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1999); the Cleveland Museum of Art (1998); and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston (1998). He has exhibited internationally in exhibitions staged at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The Print Center, Philadelphia; and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Morell’s creative process and experience as an artist was the focus of a 2007 feature length documentary, Shadow of the House.
Morell has received a number of grants and awards, which include a 1992 Cintas Grant, a 1994 Guggenheim Fellowship, and the International Center of Photography’s 2011 Infinity Award in Art. He taught as a professor at the Massachusetts College of Art & Design from 1983 until 2011.