"Very often I'm doing one thing when I'm thought to be doing another." - Walker Evans
Ethan Levitas was born in New York City in 1971.
Levitas's photographs are exhibited and collected internationally, including presentations at The New York Public Library, the Rencontres d'Arles Photographie (France), and the National Portrait Gallery (UK). His prints are held in distinguished private and public collections, including the permanent collections of The New York Public Library and The Jewish Museum, New York. He has been awarded the Siskind Fellowship (Aaron Siskind Foundation), the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Artist's Fellowship, and the Kittredge Fellowship (Harvard University), as well as multi-year project grants from the Japan-United States Friendship Commission and the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership.
Levitas has lived and lectured extensively in Japan, where he created and directed a pioneering art-in-education program for Japanese senior high schools, and in 2002 he published the program as a photo-based monograph textbook, Outside and In: Conversations about Identity , which has been used as a primary teaching material in international studies curricula throughout Japan.
Self-taught in photography, Levitas studied Government and International Relations at Cornell University.