Robert Lloyd is a black photographer and graphic communicator.The son of Lulu Stoakley, he was born in 1944 in Chicago into a large extended family headed by his maternal grandparents Fleety Olivia and Edward Custis Stoakley. E. C. Stoakley was born a slave in the Southeast, rose to the position of janitor after serving as private cook for a vice president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Fleety Stoakley was the daughter of a White House seamstress.
Robert survived a Chicago public school system education. After completing high school in 1962 he joined the Civil Rights Movement and worked as a community organizer and photographer. He moved to California in 1967 when he married a Stanford graduate, Diane Gray, a fourth generation Californian and descendant of an 1849 Gold Rush prospector.
At 27 Robert returned to school to pursue a commercial photography career at Brooks Institute of Photography, but became a dropout when his social conscience and basic humanity came into conflict with what he saw as their bigoted, narrow-minded, authoritarian, and exploitive attitudes toward people and photography.
He entered California Institute of the Arts in the summer of 1972 where he was free to develop. He participated in an accelerated graduate program, receiving an M.F.A. in June of 1974.
In September of1974 Robert began teaching photography in the Department of Art at Eastern Washington University where he also founded the EWU Gallery of Photography. In 1976 his son Stoakley was born.
Robert has continued to teach photography and also computer graphics at Eastern Washington University. He also continues to curate photography exhibitions and to explore digital photography.