Melissa Shook

Shook was born in New York, New York on April 18, 1939. She studied at Bard College and the Art Students League of New York.[4] Shook taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Creative Photo Lab in 1974, and at the University of Massachusetts Boston from 1975 to 2005.[5] Her subjects included her daughter; a series of daily self-portraits; a shelter for homeless men and women; and a wheelchair basketball team.[6] She died in Chelsea, Massachusetts on August 27, 2020.[4]

• Streets are for Nobody: Homeless Women Speak. Boston: Boston Center for the Arts, 1991. With Jane Peterson.
• My Suffolk Downs. Pressed Wafer, 2012. ISBN 978-0975323762. Poetry and photography.
• He Says, She Says, I Say, and Nobody Tells the Truth, Whatever That Is, on the Backside of Suffolk Downs: a narrative by Melissa Shook. WordTech, 2014. ISBN 978-1625490797.

• Recent Acquisitions, 1974–1976, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1976[7]
• Pictures by Women: a History of Modern Photography, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010/11[1][8]

Shook's work is held in the following permanent collections:

• Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Arizona: 83 prints (as of June 2016)[9]
• International Center of Photography, New York: 1 print (as of April 2021)[10]
• Light Work, Syracuse, New York: 8 prints (as of April 2021)[6]
• Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO: 208 prints (as of April 2021)[11]
• Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: 2 prints (as of April 2021)[2][12]
• Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden[3]
• Museum of Modern Art, New York: 37 prints (as of April 2021)[1]