Lewis Watts is a photographer, archivist/curator and professor emeritus of Art at UC Santa Cruz. His research and artwork centers primarily on cultural landscape. Focusing on African American communities in Oakland, Richmond, San Francisco, New Orleans, and Harlem. He has been teaching photography at UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley since 1978. He is co-author of the 2006 book, Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era, which features his restorations of salvaged photographs that portray musicians and patrons of the vibrant jazz scene in the Fillmore District during the 1940s and '50s. His most recent book, New Orleans Suite, co-written with Critical Sustainabilities project advisor Eric Porter, was published in 2013. Watts is also working on an extended photographic project in Cuba.