An East Tennessee native, photographer MJ Sharp has been happily based in Durham, North Carolina, for most of her adult life. She worked closely with writers and reporters on both short and longform journalism stories as the staff photographer and photography editor at the Independent in Durham for most of the 1990’s.  During much of that time she also freelanced regionally for the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, PBS’s Frontline, the Columbia Journalism Review, and the Ford Foundation, among others.  She taught at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University from 2012 — 2022 and helped found the Duke Faculty Union. She has done personal art and documentary photography for the past twenty years, culminating in a Fulbright Scholar Award in 2021/2022 to the University of Exeter, UK, where she collaborated with nocturnal ecologist Dr. Kevin Gaston to explore the effects of light pollution. 

Her artwork is included in the collections of the Akron Art Museum, the Asheville Museum of Art, the Cassilhaus Collection, The Henry-Copeland Art Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, the North Carolina Museum of Art, and the US-UK Fulbright Commission Art Collection (London), as well as many private collections.