Jerri Zbiral and Alan Teller Photographic Collection

Biography/Profile

Jerri Zbiral and Alan Teller are two Chicago area photographers with many decades of professional experience as exhibit planners, media producers, teaching, writing and other academic and non-academic experience. Alan Teller is the recipient of the Fulbright-Nehru Senior Scholar Award for his current project “Following the Box” based on a box of photos made by an unknown U.S. soldier in India towards the end of World War II. Alan and Jerri Zbiral, his partner in the project, created an exhibit of cross-cultural interpretation to explore the ways in which different cultures may teach us to see. The exhibit is currently on display at the Loyola University Museum Art in Chicago.

Alan Teller is a second generation photographer, who grew up in New York and began making pictures as a child and is still doing so. Alan graduated with B.A. Cultural Anthropology from Queens College, City University of New York and continued his graduate studies at Indiana University. Alan founded the Inner-City Photo Workshop, a storefront center for high-school dropouts on Chicago’s west side. In his early career years, Alan and Jerri co-founded the Public Art Workshop Photography Center, developed a program and taught photography to both teachers and students in K-8 grades in desegregated school districts. Alan’s experience also includes work as a photographic researcher for the Field Museum of Natural History, where he also taught classes on photography and anthropology. Alan also founded the Teller and Mandsen, a museum exhibit design company that has developed over 100 exhibits nationwide, including the permanent exhibits for the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, Vivian Maier’s Chicago and many others. He has received numerous grants for community photography projects and arts and social issues programs, published some 20 reviews and articles as well as the guidebook Photography in the Classroom. Alan also has taught photography at Columbia College, Purdue University and the School of the Art Institute, At Lake Forest College, he taught in both the History and Art departments, offering courses on photography and anthropology, public history and on museum and exhibits.

Jerri Zbiral (Born Jaroslava Irena Zbiralova) born in Prague in 1948. Her mother was a survivor of the Lidice tragedy in 1942 and in 1949 her family left Czechoslovakia for Germany, then settled in Norway for a few years and subsequently moved to Canada. In 1971, Jerri came to the Untied States to attend graduate school in Rochester, New York. In 1982 Jerri started to record the stories of her relatives and others who had survived the Lidice massacre. Ten years later, together with Alan she created a documentary, based on the Nazi destruction of a Czech village, In the Shadow of Memory,about the tragedy and her own relationship to the event. This award winning documentary explores the generational impact of hatred.