Derrell Boson

Derrell Boson is a Director / Photographer based out of Houston,Texas. Derrell Boson learned photography at Texas Southern University, and now works as a full time director and photographer. His work focuses on African American culture and its representation.

This body of work draws visual and conceptual inspiration from Christina’s World, reinterpreted through the lens of Afro-Baroque aesthetics. Where Wyeth’s original painting evokes isolation, longing, and a restrained stillness within the American landscape, this photographic series expands that emotional terrain by centering Black subjects within spaces that oscillate between vulnerability and opulence. Influenced by Afro-Baroque visual language—marked by richness, ornamentation, and a reclamation of historical narratives—these images confront the absence of Black bodies in traditional Western art histories while simultaneously reimagining their presence. Textures, fabrics, and gestures become symbolic tools: lush materials contrast with grounded, earthen environments, creating a tension between displacement and belonging. Like Christina’s distant gaze toward an unreachable home, my subjects exist in a suspended state—caught between aspiration, memory, and inherited histories. However, unlike the quiet resignation of Wyeth’s figure, these subjects embody agency. Their posture, styling, and placement assert a narrative of self-possession within spaces that were never designed to hold them.

Claire A. Warden

Claire A. Warden (b. Montréal, Québec) is an interdisciplinary artist working in still and moving image media. Her work engages and challenges representation, portraiture, racialized experience, and language in United States. She received a BFA and BA from Arizona State University and an MFA from the School of Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited in the United States and abroad, and featured in publications including Harper’s Magazine, Der Greif, Lenscratch, and Light Work. She has received awards, grants, and residencies, including at Latitude, ACRE, and Penumbra Foundation.

Mimesis is an ongoing series that engages identity, representation, and language through abstraction and experimental image-making. The creation of this work comes when the struggle to accept the unfamiliar and unkown is pervasive in American culture. When looking at my work, the urge to ask “what is it?” echoes the question, “what are you?” – a question directed to me countless times as a person of color with a diverse ethnocultural heritage and one I increasingly tend to resist. This carries through the work as resistance to definition and, instead, emphasizes opacity and illegibility. These concepts, informed by anti-essentialism and decolonial theory, ultimately make way for my experimental image-making practice as mode to subvert the problematics of representation in photography, particularly in addressing experiences had by people of color. I believe it is important to know that the Mimesis series is photographic—cameraless photographs—and that I developed a cameraless process that uses saliva to break down the emulsion of film. What is left is metallic silver and my biologic matter—thus exploring photographic materiality, identity formation, and illegibility. These works of self-portraiture do not show a viewer what I look like but are built from my DNA and shaped by my experiences.

Blya Krouba

Blya Krouba is a mixed-media artist born in Côte d’Ivoire and raised in the US. Her work is centered around photography that examines migration and image equity of Black women. Drawing from personal experience, she addresses issues such as colorism and contemporary narratives that shape how Black women are seen and understood. Her installations incorporate fabric and domestic elements. She brings individuals into conversation, documenting exchanges that transform strangers into community, while referencing both photographic history and lived experience. Ultimately Her work affirms, celebrates, and expand representations of Black womanhood while creating spaces for healing, connection, and shared storytelling.

This body of work brings together photographs I made in Côte d’Ivoire (file #3) and in the United States to examine how identity is shaped across place, memory, and community. Objects and gestures drawn from my childhood in Côte d’Ivoire and my life in America act as anchors between these spaces. I print some images on matte paper and others on fabric, including works from my series AfroMelange (files #2 and #4), which I install on a clothesline. This gesture transforms private, in-home conversations into a shared visual language. The work emerges from intimate, recorded dialogues with African and African American women in Houston, where we reflect on culture, displacement, and belonging. I respond to the history of photography, particularly the legacy of the “Shirley” card, which standardized whiteness and shaped how Black skin has been misrepresented. Through my use of light, shadow, and material, I intentionally center and honor the depth of Blackness (files #1 and #5). At its core, this work is about sisterhood. I explore the weight of inherited histories alongside moments of release, creating space for Black women to be seen, held, and reimagined beyond imposed narratives.

Jakayla Monay

Jakayla Monay is a photographer and filmmaker. Her work moves through the layers of Black life in the South. Each project begins with the innocence of childhood and culminates in the wisdom of elders to build visual conversations tracing how we grow, learn, and then return to ourselves. Monay’s work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions across Houston, including Welcome to The Mothership: We Gather In Their Names at the Community Artists’ Collective and SALVATION at the Anderson Center for the Arts and FOTO Fest. In 2023, she received the Inaugural Jones Artist Award from the Houston Endowment.Astrophotography fills me with awe and wonder. Capturing the night sky connects me to something greater and lets me share that beauty with others. What began as a hobby has become a true passion, blending art and science in every image I create.

My work begins with memory and unfolds into what I want to see in art spaces and in the world. I study how Black people carry stories, through our gestures, rituals, and the everyday moments that sustain us. Each project follows a certain rhythm. Beginning with a child and ending with an elder. It’s a way to trace the cycle of becoming and returning, of learning, unlearning, and remembering. My work doesn’t center trauma, it centers what comes after. The softness that survives. The moments when we rebuild. I’m drawn to those spaces. Side profiles appear often in my images. Historically, that angle was used to catalog and dehumanize Black people. For me, it’s a form of reclamation, an act of quiet resistance. By reimagining that view, I’m restoring dignity and giving shape to presence. Working primarily with photography, I approach image-making as both documentation and transformation. As of today I am actively incorporating material and process-based experimentation to expand how images hold time and presence. I am currently integrating alternative techniques such as cyanotype and retro-reflective print processes, allowing light to become an active element in the work.

Ursula Sokolowska

Ursula Sokolowska was born in Krakow, Poland. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2001. Her work, while deeply personal, explores themes of psychological fragmentation and the objectification of identity. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, with notable shows at The Travelling Gallery (Edinburgh, Scotland), the Saatchi Gallery and Zoo Art Fair (London), the Royal Academy of Arts (UK), the Minnesota Center for Photography, and Schneider Gallery (Chicago). In 2024, she was honored with the prestigious Meier Award in recognition of her contributions to contemporary photography.

Multiples is a deeply personal exploration of identity, fragmentation, and resilience. This series presents abstract self-portraits that reflect the emotional dissonance of navigating loss and self-reconstruction. Using layered photographic techniques, I deconstruct and reassemble my own image, revealing the multiplicity of selves that appear in the aftermath of profound change. Through distortion, repetition, and erasure, these works embody the tension between visibility and disappearance. Between who I was, who I am, and who I am becoming. The fractured forms and shifting perspectives mirror the psychological experience of uncertainty, grief, and renewal. By embracing abstraction, Multiples resists a singular narrative, instead offering an evolving dialogue between the past and present. This series is not just about loss; it is about transformation. It speaks to how personal upheaval forces us to confront our own fluidity, challenging the fixed notions of identity we once held. In these images, I find both rupture and repair, destruction, and reinvention. A visual meditation on the process of becoming whole again.

Stephanie Cuyubamba Kong

Stephanie Cuyubamba Kong (b. Ohio) is a Peruvian-American artist and educator working between Houston, Texas, and Lima, Perú. She is a former Fulbright U.S. grant recipient (2022-2023, Perú), and has exhibited locally and internationally with institutions including the Houston Center for Photography, Blaffer Art Museum, Friends Gallery, FLATS, the University of Dayton, Monumental Callao, Wave Pool Gallery, Northern Kentucky University, Magenta Galeria, and the University of Kentucky. She currently resides in Houston, TX, where she is an instructor and MFA candidate in the Photography department at the University of Houston.

Stephanie Cuyubamba Kong is a Peruvian-American artist and educator, whose lush aesthetic approach belies a melancholy situated in diaspora. Her self-portraits center vulnerability, melancholy, and softness, rejecting photographic fetish by refusing to self-exoticize in front of the camera. Her practice navigates the complexity of embodying both pre-columbian and colonial pasts through self-portraiture and installations. With a post-colonial sensibility, she critiques the objectification of ancestral cultures imposed by the anthropological lens, whilst also highlighting a dialogue between contemporary Lima and its material past. Her work mines representations of place, culture, and self through material and gestural metaphors, like the Paracas burials appropriated as museum objects and ethnographic subjects. She shrouds herself like these ancestral figures, but a visual sensibility towards shrouding, veiling, and haze often obscures the subject (the artist), and she considers this visual strategy a rejection of legibility, or a way of mitigating the ease of visual consumption of her own body. By implicating herself, body, and labor in the making of each image; she expresses how diaspora complicates our relationship to the past, and is carried as emotional weight within the present.

Edward Hernandez

Edward Hernandez is a photographer based between Brooklyn, NY and Houston, TX. His work explores themes of home, memory, and migration through portraiture and landscape, often drawing from his family’s history in Linares, Mexico. Working across digital and analog processes, Hernandez creates images that function as visual heirlooms, preserving personal and cultural narratives. He received his BFA in Photography from Pratt Institute and has exhibited in New York and Houston.

The images I am presenting move between portrait and place, tracing my family’s presence in Linares, Mexico. Made between 2024 and 2025, they hold moments across different points in time, shaped by both closeness and distance. I photograph my mother among her keepsakes, my grandmother gazing outward into the landscape, moments of labor and stillness in the montes, and the surrounding land that holds these histories. A Google Street View video marks the beginning of this project. While moving through the town with my mother, she began recalling her childhood, guiding me through streets and spaces I had known only through stories. In that moment, I began screen recording, recognizing something I could not return to in the same way again. After the recent passing of my grandfather, these images have taken on a different weight. What once felt like documentation now feels like preservation. I think about what remains and what is no longer there, and how these photographs act as visual heirlooms, holding onto moments that continue to shift with time. The work exists in that space where memory, loss, and presence overlap.

Miguel Espinosa

Miguel Espinosa is a visual artist based out of San Jose California. He grew up in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He received his bachelor's in fine arts from the Laguna College of Art + Design in 2018.

I see portraiture as an important tool for documenting personhood. I realized how blind spots in knowledge limit the way we imagine the past. I want viewers in the future to imagine our time now and not have to worry about having blind spots in their imaginings of our time. I appreciate honoring folks here and now with my portraits. Longterm, I am interested in creating work that ensures representation for communities that are under-recognized or mischaracterized.

Judson Womack

Judson Womack (he/him)(b. 1995) is a photographer and educator based between Jackson, Mississippi and Chicago, Illinois. He holds a BFA in Art from Davidson College and an MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago. Womack's work presents a photographic exploration of embodied and inhabited “place” through landscapes, precious objects, and beloved rituals; having first begun in classical media, evolving instead towards the meaningful constraints of the photographic medium. In 2024, he was selected as Columbia College's Abelson Graduate Research Fellow and in 2025 for Lenscratch's Student Prize "Top 25 to Watch.” Womack lives, works, and teaches in Jackson, Mississippi.

Lay Us Down is a reflection on place and self in the Deep South. These images are about my home, my “place,” in every important meaning of that word. That is to say I don’t know how to describe my place to you. I want to, desperately. Every one of these photographs was made with the sort of frantic, obsessive desperation of someone struggling to convey the complexities of that fundamental piece of self which seemingly ought to be the most comprehensible and communicable. Therein may be why I began making these photographs. Every now and then, a familiar aspect manifests itself and I can place this little box down and record it, such that I might piece together a portrait of place—the explanation of self—I’m longing for. I don’t suspect this journey ends in peace. Together, these images form a psychological landscape bound between its nostalgia and its decay. Each of these frames is a portal into the dimension where time doesn’t exist; where the South’s ghosts, of all its horrors and myths, pass each other on the road every day. To remain here may be to become one of them. That feels like home, where you’ll find me.

Monica Takvam

Monica Takvam is a visual artist based in London and Norway, dividing her time between projects and research, commissions, curating and lecturing photography. Her work is often concerned with how we see, and in an often participatory and community based practice, she use photography, text, oral history, illustration, video and sound to explore knowledge, language and identity. She holds a Master from University of the Arts London, London College of Communication, and has lectured photography at several universities across England. She has been the managing director of Renaissance Photography Prize, she now runs Kunstgarasjen, Norway.

Through the series The Disobedient Researcher, Monica Takvam invites us to reflect on how we learn, share, and experience knowledge. After many years of teaching in higher education, she turns her attention to the structures of learning – questioning the rules, assumptions, and hierarchies that define academic research and education. The series continues her long-standing engagement with themes of language, perception and the body as a site of knowing. Exploring the space between theory and practice, between what can be measured, and what resists categorisation, she questions the conventions of conducting research: the manuals, the methodologies, the systems designed to produce ‘objective’ results. She uses rules as both framework and resistance, working within them, bending them, and allowing them to break. This method of ‘disobedient research’ opens space for subjectivity, softness and contradiction. In her new series of photographs, the expected objects and step-by-step instructions from various handbooks have been omitted. Instead, we are left with gestures and compositions that resist immediate interpretation. With each image stripped of its original context, our brain instinctively searches for patterns and logic.

Shuyuan Zhou

Shuyuan Zhou (she/her, b. 2001) is a lens-based artist and poet currently based in Chicago. Her work critically examines patriarchal structures in East Asian societies, engaging with themes such as intergenerational trauma and domestic violence. Her recent projects explore nostalgia, immigrant identity, and the emotional residue of familial and cultural displacement. Born and raised in China, Zhou holds a B.A. from Duke University and an MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited at EXPO CHICAGO, Atlanta Photography Group, and the Center for Photographic Art, among others.

This story begins with my mother. After she was born, her biological parents tried to drown her. She survived, only to be sent away as a child bride. Her aunt shared the same fate—I never knew her real name. She is remembered only through names given by men: by her adoptive father, her husband, her grandson. Her life, like many women’s in the village, was defined by others. My grandmother was the exception, raised as a “son” because no boy was born. Yet she later reproduced the same violence: attempting to kill my mother and killing her younger daughter, until a son was born to fulfill expectations. At ten, my mother was sent back—unwanted, malnourished, and denied education. She endured years of neglect and survived. Across generations, patriarchy inscribes itself onto women’s lives. My grand-aunt lives with resentment, my grandmother with silence, my mother with grief—and I remain entangled in this inheritance. In this work, I reconstruct four generations through staged photographic interventions, blending memory and fiction. By inserting myself into the image, I become both a carrier of trauma and a sign of change.

Alfredo Esparza

MA in Humanistic Studies, specializing in History by the UV of ITESM (México, 2008). Graduated from the Contemporary Photography Seminary of Centro de la Imagen (México, 2012). He has had solo and group shows in Argentina, Colombia, Iceland, USA, Guatemala, and México. Fellow National System of Art Creators member in México 2021-2124. Northern Exposure Scholarship winner at Medium Photo Festival (San Diego, USA, 2024). Twice recipient of the Art Production Grant from the Municipality of Fjarðabyggð, Iceland (2023 & 2022). Shortlisted for La Bienal en Resistencia 2021 in Guatemala, Guatemala.

I'm participating with 2 bodies of work. Ephemeral imbrications (first 2 images): Fleeting works built from small actions carried out with elements found in rural areas of central-northern México. Such elements can be animal or vegetal remains like carcasses or branches; but mostly, I use trash generated by humans: plastics, metals, clothing, auto parts, packaging, and industrial waste. For every photograph, I choose a few of these elements; I organize them so they obtain sculptural qualities that I document with my camera. The ephemeral imbrications only exist for the image. Once the photograph is made, they become junk again, which, in this ecosystem, find a fate subject to oblivion and deterioration, with a very slow but steady amalgamation into the environment. What we do in the meantime (last 3 images): The selected works for this call are brief actions that reorganize how we relate to others, language, and the environments we inhabit. Working with photography and video, I create minimal, simple actions in open spaces that might be absurd or humorous, that introduce subtle disruptions within the ordinary. The work unfolds through interaction, open to others, environmental conditions, and unforeseen responses, in an unstable space between intention and accident.

Atefeh Farajolahzadeh

Atefeh Farajolahzadeh is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice incorporates photography, video, installation, and writing. Her work explores ideas of place, psychogeography, and liminality, with a particular focus on migration. Atefeh holds an MFA in photography from Columbia College Chicago. She is the recipient of the 2023 Cleveland Arts Prize, and her work has been exhibited at Ground Floor, Hyde Park Art Center’s biennial exhibition, Chicago; Filter Photo, Chicago; SPACES, Cleveland; among others. She is currently a visiting assistant professor at Indiana University in Bloomington.

The two video works are part of an ongoing series, Still Moving, which explores the psychological experience of immigration. No Answer represents the desire to merge two distinct places—the motherland and the host land—as well as the impossibility of physical reconnection. Things Remain is divided into four segments with a fragmentary and expressive narration and explores the psychological struggle to cope with loss, the complexity of the journey, and uncertainty.

Jad Mabsout

Jad Mabsout is a Lebanese-American designer and photographer based in Houston, currently studying industrial design at the University of Houston. His work moves between product-making and image-making, with a focus on how environments are shaped by memory, displacement, and everyday use. Through photography, he documents lived spaces and moments that reflect endurance and continuity. His design work is also rooted in the same principles of endurance and memory.

These photographs are part of a personal project documenting Lebanon, my home country, in the aftermath of the 2020 Beirut port explosion. Rather than focusing on destruction alone, this series centers on the persistence of everyday life and the quiet, often overlooked forms of resilience that emerged in its wake. Through images of lived-in streets and human presence, I aim to capture how people continue to inhabit and reclaim their environments despite instability. The photographs do not reduce Lebanon to a site of tragedy, but highlight endurance, the resistant act of staying. As a Lebanese-American, this work is not neutral documentation but an act of witnessing. It reflects both grief and continuity, emphasizing that resilience is not a single moment of recovery, but a sustained, collective process. Existence is resistance.

Nyo Jinyong Lian

Nyo Jinyong Lian is a Chinese artist and photographer working between Paris, Shanghai, and New York. Her practice constructs staged photographic situations to examine trust, power, and intimacy as social systems, where private space operates as a site of negotiation and latent politics. Shaped by her cross-cultural positioning between Asian and Western contexts, her work reflects on how subjectivity is formed within these structures. She was awarded the Grand Prize at the 2025 212 Photography Festival and has exhibited at Les Rencontres d’Arles. Her artist book Trust Me was shortlisted for the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson Self-Published Photobook Award 2025.

Nyo Jinyong Lian is a visual artist working across staged photography and moving image. Her practice constructs carefully choreographed situations where relationships are tested as systems rather than expressions of emotion. Approaching fiction as a form of social architecture, she develops images that function as speculative models—spaces in which gestures, proximity, and repetition reveal the structures shaping intimacy, trust, and power. Drawing on her cross-cultural positioning between Asian and Western contexts, her work examines how subjectivity is formed within these dynamics. Situated between performance, tableau, and cinematic image-making, Lian reimagines the body as a site where social relations are negotiated, constrained, and reconfigured. Her work invites viewers to consider private space not as neutral, but as a field of latent politics, where systems of control and vulnerability are continuously enacted and challenged.

Carlos Salazar-Lermont

Carlos Salazar-Lermont is a Venezuelan artist focused on performance and socially engaged art. He received his MFA in Visual Arts from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis as a Danforth Scholar (2022), and a dual MA in Arts Administration & Policy and Modern and Contemporary Art History from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), with the New Artists Society full-tuition scholarship. His work has been exhibited internationally in museums, institutions, and galleries across Europe and the Americas. He lives and works in Chicago.

Through my practice, I reflect on Latin America’s historical circumstances by deconstructing the social, political, and economic fabrics that define them. I aim to dismantle dehumanizing myths by visualizing the paradoxes between what is said about us and our reality. I attempt to disclose the underlying Catholic origin of Latin American cultural burdens, such as glorifying poverty, guilt, and self-humiliation. I use visual codes inherited from the colonial process to reveal these structures. The concept of Vanitas appears recurrently in this research. Originating in the book of Ecclesiastes, it states how the ephemerality of life divests existence of any transcendental sense. Performativity is the common thread between these concerns, expressed in a post-mediatic language. I use live performance, photography, video, and other forms of time-based media to express the transformative potential of action. Community engagement is a key strategy in my process. I connect with groups and collectives outside the art world’s mainstream to help bring their stories to the foreground and amplify their voices. My goal is to make my work a pedagogical device from which my audiences and I can learn more about who we are and our place in history in ways that can transform us positively.

Thero Makepe

I am an artist and photographer born and raised in Gaborone, Botswana, working between Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Gaborone. My practice is informed by past and present narratives related to my upbringing and lived experiences in Botswana and South Africa. Thematically, my work explores nihilism, African history and coming-of-age. My approach to photography employs a variety of styles, including staged portraiture, documentary, and re-enactments. I am also a founding member of the Botswana Pavilion, a collective of young artists from Botswana dedicated to advancing Botswana’s creative development and artistic heritage.

Included in my submission are artworks from two major projects from the past several years that outline the aesthetic and philosophical path through which I engage photography as a historical device in visual culture. ‘Phomolo Sello’, ‘Father and Daughter’ and ‘Kereke II’ are taken from ‘We Didn’t Choose to be Born Here’, an ongoing project that explores the history of activism, migration, musicality, loss, and rest in my family lineage in South Africa and Botswana. My photographic practice for this project involves creating performative images in which I or other living family members embody the personas of our ancestors. I also create staged photographs that interpret the memories and emotions of the elders in my family. ‘Matlapana Bridge’ and ‘Insurance’ are taken from “It’s Not Going to Get Better”, a project whose title reflects a sentiment among young people shaped by unemployment, class barriers, and political stagnation in Botswana. Continuing with my practice of staged imagery, the project captures the mood amongst the youth and the deprived, barren landscape of Botswana – a nation that is heavily reliant on diamond mining as a source of economic wealth.

Lit Wing Hung

Lit is a multidisciplinary artist based in London and Hong Kong, working and exhibiting internationally. In parallel with her artistic practice, she works as an art director, scenographer, and Cheongsam making, which informs her sensitivity to material, craft, and spatial composition. Lit is currently completing an MFA in Arts and Humanities at the Royal College of Art, London, where she continues to develop her engagement with materiality, space, and socially informed practice.

Lit is a multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, textile, and participatory installation. Her practice explores how care, labour, and bodily resilience are shaped within conditions of mobility, displacement, and contemporary crisis. Through responsive, body-oriented structures, she positions the viewer as an ակտիվ participant, revealing the fragile infrastructures that sustain everyday life. Through photography, Lit extends her work into a new context, rethinking performative and wearable sculpture as image-based encounters. Rather than serving as documentation, the photographic frame becomes a space of translation, where action, tension, and gesture are condensed and rearticulated. The five selected images, drawn from her performative and wearable sculptures, communicate a shared visual language of control and resistance. Actions such as touch, breath, and repetitive labour—central to her sculptural practice—remain visible as traces within the image, holding a sense of duration within stillness. Informed by her background in scenography and garment-making, she approaches composition with sensitivity to surface, reflection, and the relationship between body and material. Through this shift, photography becomes a means to carry her work across contexts, extending its reach while preserving its embodied and conceptual intensity.

Brian Edwards Jr.

Brian Edwards Jr. is a Texas-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice centers on the preservation and documentation of Black life across the American South. Working primarily through photography, he creates images that function as both record and reflection, tracing relationships between land, memory, and identity. His work explores the visual language of Black life, focusing on rodeo communities, rural geographies, and inherited traditions. Moving between portraiture and landscape, Edwards emphasizes stillness and the quiet weight of history embedded in place. He approaches photography as visual stewardship, building an evolving archive that positions Black Southern life as foundational to the American landscape.

On My Way Home is an ongoing body of work that anchors my practice, using photography to engage Black Western life across the American South. My work moves between portraiture and landscape to examine how labor, tradition, and community shape both individual and collective experience. Working within rural geographies and rodeo communities, I am drawn to moments of stillness, nuance, and quiet beauty, where the relationship between people and land becomes most apparent. Operating between documentary and conceptual approaches, I treat photography as both evidence and interpretation. The work functions as an evolving archive, holding memory, lived experience, and continuity. Rooted in my own upbringing and connection to these spaces and communities, I make this work carrying forward what I’ve inherited and what continues to shape us, grounding Black western culture within the landscape as present, enduring, and foundational.

Justin A. Carney

Justin A. Carney is an artist whose work explores memory, family, and the ways history is carried across generations. Working across photography, archival materials, and material processes, his practice questions what images can hold and what remains unresolved, focusing on presence, absence, and memory's instability. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, in venues such as the Museum of Art Fort Collins, Aurora PhotoCenter, Photo London, and the Center for Photographic Art. He is also the recipient of the LensCulture Art Photography Award and the Beckmann Emerging Artist Fellowship, and his work is held in several public collections.

Those Left Behind is a photography project and forthcoming photobook that questions how the death of a loved one reshapes bonds that hold a family together. After the passing of my grandmother, the center of my family's world, I began documenting the quiet changes that followed among her children: the ways relationships shifted, how people slowly returned to one another after loss, and how my grandmother's presence continued to live within those left behind. Through contemporary portraits, photos of domestic spaces, archival family images, and interview excerpts, the work considers how memory and connection are carried through gestures, habits, and everyday environments. Photographs made in the present are placed in dialogue with archival images, creating visual connections across generations and beyond death. These pairings reveal how traces of the past persist and how familial connections continually shift. While focused on my own family, the project speaks to broader questions about grief, memory, and community. Those Left Behind asks what holds families together, what causes them to separate, and how individuals navigate the fragile process of rebuilding connection, of rebuilding community. The book reflects on how memory and presence endure beyond death, shaping the identities and relationships of those who remain.

Robert Chase Heishman

Robert Chase Heishman is a conceptual and experimental artist working across photography, film/video, and painting. Raised in a lineage of bricklayers and farmers, his practice carries forward a tradition of construction and cultivation — treating photographs as both object and inquiry, examining labor, authorship, and perception between images and reality. His collaborations with Merce Cunningham, Michael Rakowitz, Megan Schvaneveldt, and Brian Maguire continue to shape his practice. His work is held in the collections of the Walker Art Center and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. He holds an MFA from Northwestern University and a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute.

My practice centers on photography — conceptual and experimental — treating the photograph as object and inquiry. Raised in a lineage of bricklayers and farmers, I carry forward a tradition of construction and cultivation, examining labor, authorship, and perception in how images are made and circulated. _IMG (2012–present) uses tape and forced perspective to construct compositions across floors, walls, and objects. They resolve only through the camera's single vantage point that collapses three-dimensional space into a flat image. The construction can take days and exists, complete, only in the instant of the shutter. Each piece invites viewers to slow down and notice the slippage between image and reality. Memory Colors (2025–present) draws from the photographic color card's "memory colors" — standardized hues in color science (blue sky, foliage, skin tones) that humans recognize and recall. Presented as near-monochromes, they no longer confirm visual accuracy but operate as memories of reality — echoes shaped by shifting environmental and cultural conditions. Etched Braille on non-glare plexiglas functions as described media rather than translation — a parallel channel recording sensory and temporal information outside the frame. The image and the text are parallel, not identical: two distinct ways of mediating the same moment.

Marina Cavadini

Marina Cavadini is a visual artist based in Milan, where she teaches at the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti. She holds an MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MA in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies from NABA. She is a recipient of the Eldon Danhausen Fellowship in Sculpture and has been an artist-in-residence at Nida Art Colony (Lithuania), ACRE (Wisconsin), and Casa Vettese–Donati P11 (Tuscany). Since 2018, she has been part of ALTALENA collective. Her research unfolds through a multidisciplinary practice that engages with ephemerality, seduction, intimacy, and relationships with the rural.

Marina Cavadini’s research combines organic and inanimate matter, involving processes of extinction, mimicry, and symbiosis. With a surreal and erotic tone, her work invites one to experience the post-natural realm as a viscous dimension that tends to gratify but simultaneously unsettles. Tactile and intimate experiences are to be perceived in terms of intensity. Close-ups and static poses follow one another without a narrative; there is no beginning or end. When meaning is not subordinate to the concept, subjects and visual impressions are amplified. Awe for textures and details induces an alteration of consciousness and evokes the drifting and disjointed nature of the present experience.

Luciana Demichelis

(Ensenada, 1992) Argentine photographer of non-binary identity. Selected as one of the '15 most promising emerging photographers from around the world' compiled by the British Journal of Photography 'Ones to Watch' 2023. Graduated in Communication specializing in Journalism from the National University of La Plata and a Master’s in Contemporary Photography from LENS School of Visual Arts - Universidad Europea Miguel de Cervantes (Madrid) (Madrid), in her projects they investigate the Latin American imaginary, technology, rituals, dissident identities and the political value of the party.

How can we envision technological sovereignty in space during these challenging times for our region? The LTEUSDLL project (The Earth is a satellite of the moon) is a photographic essay that explores how Latin American satellites offer a space alternative and represent the capacity of this region to dream. What is a satellite for? What does it mean symbolically and culturally? Among other uses, satellites observe the earth to provide images. They can show the severity of an oil spill, they allow us to see how human beings modify geographical space over time. To date, North American companies have sent 4,300 satellites into space, while Argentina, the country where I come from, has sent almost 30 satellites in its entire history. In order to create a global satellite internet network, with its consequent monopoly in technological terms, the large internet services of the global north seek to sell their service to the countries of the South American region at a very high cost while polluting the land with thousands of satellites. With a political view of the imagination, I am interested in mixing photography and fiction to think about new perspectives within documentary photography.

Michael Catarineau

Michael Catarineau is a Houston-born Texan that will take a photo of just about any person, place or thing. He likes cats, the desert, finding shapes in the clouds and watching paint dry.

Can these bones live? I make a yearly return to the Big Bend to reflect on the previous year, clear my mind and soak up the constellations that get lost in Houston’s milky purple night sky. This last trip was heavy with grief. I was — have been/am still/will always be — grieving the loss of my mother; I was grieving the loss of potential — in me, in relationships, in both the world around me and far out of my grasp; I was grieving my perceived missed experiences, which were lost for a myriad of reasons. This desert used to be an ocean. I wonder if it grieves the water. Now it’s something different. Forever changed, but still beautiful. Still home to abundant life. Still beloved by many. Still Texan (if you believe in that sort of thing). The desert grieves the rain, I’m sure, but the rain always returns. I always return. Year after year. I stand at the base of these mountains. The dry desert stretched out behind me. The foothills surround me. Everything thirsts.

Kennedi Carter

Kennedi Carter (b. 1998) is a lens-based artist working across photography and digital media. Born in Charlottesville, Virginia, and raised in Durham, North Carolina, her practice engages archiving as both method and metaphor, preserving and reimagining Black life in the American South. Rooted in an interest in Southern life and Black religious practice, her work draws from vernacular traditions, spiritual ritual, and memory. Carter examines the aesthetic and sociopolitical dimensions of Black experience, foregrounding intimacy, texture, trauma, pleasure, love, faith, and community. Her images challenge dominant ideas of beauty and position Blackness as expansive, self-defined, and generative.

The culture of the Gullah Geechee corridor conjures live oaks draped in Spanish moss, the sweetest low country spirituals carried through humid air, and the slow, wading movement of Black folk in water. What endures here is not produced by the landscape, but carried within the people—Africa held through language, ritual, and ways of being. Shaped by maroonage, the corridor holds an ecology where land, water, and spirit remain in relation with those who inhabit it. This project takes its title from a Gullah Geechee proverb: “The water bring we… the water wanna take we back…” Water operates as rapture and return—a violent taking and spiritual threshold through which Africa is severed yet reconstituted. Transatlantic passage marks an apocalyptic break, a cosmological undoing, but within rupture new systems of relation, memory, and spirit are forged. The work searches for Africa within the Low Country—not as a distant origin, but as something conjured, practiced, and lived. Drawing on cosmogram and conjure traditions, the photographs trace spiritual systems that collapse boundaries between living and ancestral realms. Diasporic knowledge persists against erasure and precarity, memory becomes an active practice of survival -- past and present converge in the sacred cartography of the corridor.. 

Gabi Magaly

Gabi Magaly is an emerging artist from Bryan, Texas, currently based in Houston. She earned her BFA from Sam Houston State University in 2015 and her MFA in Visual Arts from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 2020. Working primarily in photography, she also incorporates sculptural installation and embroidery. Her solo exhibitions include TCU Gallery, Temple College, Presa House Gallery, and Casa Lu in Mexico City. Her work has appeared in group exhibitions across the U.S., Mexico, and Germany. Magaly is a two-time CAMMIE award recipient and has served on the SPE and TPS Boards of Directors.

Inspired by her journey, reclaiming her identity and strength after a 12-year relationship with her ex. Magaly examines the complexities of life outside traditional societal roles, such as the nurturing caregiver, submissive wife, or self-sacrificing mother in her current project. She explores solitude not as a void but as a source of personal fulfillment and empowerment, redefining what it means to exist beyond these culturally ingrained expectations. Through evocative imagery that draws from Mexican-American cultural iconography, such as strong emotions and memories tied to identity, tradition, and personal experiences. Magaly honors the resilience of Chicana women and her ancestors, transforming the concept of Soledad (solitude) into a journey of self-love and liberation from generational trauma. Magaly is reclaiming soledad, challenging the notion of solitude as loneliness and redefining it as a space for growth, empowerment, and self-discovery. Through self-portraits, immersive installations, and performative elements, her work emphasizes the strength and beauty found in embracing one's individuality outside societal expectations.

Aiko Wakao Austin

Aiko Wakao Austin is an interdisciplinary artist whose multicultural upbringing informs her exploration of identity and cultural memory. Born in Tokyo and raised in Italy, she received a B.A. in International Relations from Brown University. After graduation, she worked in Japan as a journalist for Bloomberg and Reuters, and later in finance. Austin moved to New York in 2016 and began photographing professionally. Her project, “what we inherit,” has been recognized internationally, including Top 10 Winner of LensCulture Critics’ Choice, Critical Mass Top 50 and FRESH KLOMPCHING Edition. She currently lives and works in New York.

My photography explores the concept of identity and culture. Having moved in and out of Japan since I was a young child, my own identity is multifaceted and floats between cultural boundaries. Focusing on themes such as language, memory and heritage, I document details that show where we came from and where we’ve been, and try to explain how those experiences shape my understanding of the world around me.

Lexi Parra

Lexi Parra is a Venezuelan-American photographer, editor, and educator based in Houston, TX. She is a freelance photojournalist working across the Americas with outlets including The Washington Post, NPR, and The New York Times. Her work explores youth culture, migration, inequality, violence, and resilience. She is supported by organizations like Magnum Foundation, Getty Images and the Pulitzer Center. Parra is Community Manager at Women Photograph, leading its mentorship program, and founded Project MiRA, a photography education initiative for young women in Caracas.

Sueños (Dreams) is a photographic project developed over the past three years documenting migrant communities across the U.S. The selection submitted reflects moments from the past year as deportation campaigns escalated. This project centers everyday moments that carry deeper psychic and social weight. I work in homes, shelters, and churches, using dreams as an anchor in stories of detention and deportation to reveal the psychological impact of life under shifting immigration policies. The images rely on intimate portraiture and restrained composition, often to protect identities, while conveying emotional truth. Rooted in long-term relationships and ethical practice, Sueños moves beyond headlines to build an archive of sustained encounters that insists on empathy, reflection, and resilience.

Anselm Ebulue

Anselm Ebulue is an artist and educator based in London. Ebulue holds an MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography from the London College of Communication. In 2019 he was awarded the Magnum Photos Intensive Documentary Scholarship and has been a winner in the 2018 and 2020 Portrait of Britain Award. He was shortlisted for Palm* Photo Prize in 2024 and awarded the Bradford City of Culture Commission from Impressions Gallery in 2025. His work has been exhibited and published internationally with clients including The Guardian, The New Yorker, Financial Times, Kinfolk and Red Bull.

Whims of the Rye is a photography series centred on Peckham in south-east London, where Ebulue has been a lifelong resident. Ebulue’s approach seeks out the tension between his own memories and the visceral discomfort that comes with the powerful forces of change, expressing a sense of loss and mourning for an area at odds with gentrification. Concerned with themes of legacy, perception and memory, the work highlights the Black communities present in the area through portraiture while providing a historical context for the negative racialised overtones that continue to persist today. Peckham remains a place of cultural significance for the African and Caribbean diasporas in London. Ebulue makes a point in elevating that significance through quiet moments of stillness and beauty.

Chantal Lesley

Chantal Lesley (she/her) is an Austin-based artist and first-generation American from the Rio Grande Valley, born to Peruvian and German immigrants. Her work explores identity, belonging, and social issues shaped by her multicultural experience. Lesley earned a BFA in Fine Art Photography from Texas State University in 2021 and has exhibited across the U.S., at institutions such as the Houston Center for Photography, Craighead Green Gallery, and Touchstone Gallery. She has participated in residencies such as LATITUDE, Vermont Studio Center, kala, and Château d'Orquevaux.

My work explores the intangible, including memory, dreams, and the shifting spaces between reality and imagination. I am drawn to fragments that linger—such as inherited stories, fleeting moments, and the blurred line between what is remembered and forgotten. Through photography, textiles, and sculpture, I create spaces where the unseen and unspoken take form. Raised on the U.S./Mexico border by Peruvian and German immigrant parents, my background informs a sense of in-betweenness that runs through my practice. What began as an investigation of cultural identity has evolved into a broader exploration of liminality, examining thresholds between belonging and alienation, presence and absence, and the personal and the collective. My process is both self-reflective and generative. Photography grounds the work in the real, while textiles weave fragmented narratives, and sculpture gives shape to the ephemeral. My work invites viewers into the spaces between cultures, identities, and histories that shape who I am—an invitation to linger in ambiguity and consider how memory, longing, and the intangible shape who we are and how we connect.

Myah Asha Jeffers

MYAH ASHA JEFFERS (b. 1994) is a London based Portrait and Documentary Photographer, Writer and Director. Jeffers is interested in witnessing and documenting the Black quotidian and by extension, working class communities through themes of queerness, memory, grief, ritual and kinship. Recent solo shows include In Living Memory (2026), Acts of Communion (2025) and Exclusion Zone (2026). She was artist in residence at Visual Studies Workshop, New York (Jan 2025) and the 2024 recipient of The Joan Wakelin Bursary (The Guardian and The Royal Photographic Society). Other accolades include The Photography Foundation Awards (2024) and Portrait of Britain Award (2019/21).

The submitted photographs are part of two photographic projects The Apostles (2025 – ongoing) and Returning to Soil (2021 – ongoing). “The Apostles” is my newest series documenting the world of The Apostles of Muchinjikwa, a community of mainly Zimbabwean descendent churchgoers based in the United Kingdom, who uphold Christian Apolistic practices hailing from Southern Africa. Characterised by their distinctive white garments and traditional customs, this series specifically focuses on the “Jorodhani” an annual major baptism ceremony inviting members of the apostolic church to South End on Sea to sing, dance and worship for many hours. South End on Sea is a British seaside town, known for its right-wing conservatism and hostility towards communities of colour. The church's presence here is an act of resistance. Something that I’ve aimed to document photographically. “Returning to Soil” explores the traditions of Black Caribbean and African diasporic funerals in Britain. This work specifically focuses on the quiet moments of solitude, ancestral acts of ritualised service and poignant moments of connection - thus, contributing to the long-standing histories of the Black family archive.

Valentine Ollawa

Valentine Ollawa is a Nigerian-American photographer whose work explores how identity is transformed through migration, memory, and history, and the tension between what is carried and what is left behind. He creates richly detailed photographs of daily life that confront the migrant experience, as acts of resistance and survival. He's held solo exhibitions at Lone Star College-Kingwood and the University of Houston-Downtown and participated in juried group shows at the Houston Center for Photography, The Print Center, and Avondale Art Center, among others. Selected for the Eddie Adams Workshop Class of 2025 and the 2024 CENTER Annual Santa Fe Review.

I Built This House For You meditates on the hidden sacrifices of migration and the quiet negotiations of carrying one’s hopes forward. The "House" becomes both a refuge and the sacrifices endured on the journey towards belonging and achievement. Becoming a site of tension where memory, ritual, and the politics of identity are negotiated across distance, between continuity and adaptation. Drawing on my personal journey migrating from Nigeria to the US, this work documents the ordinary moments of daily life while balancing the urgency within migrant communities to maintain continuity of tradition and identity. These images hold the tension between memory of home, the present, and the future.

Robert Drea

Robert Drea was Chair of the Photography and Digital Media Department of the American Academy of Art College, 2007-2023. At the Academy he developed a course of study in photography, eventually writing curricula for an eight-semester program. His self-directed national survey of fifty gun violence survivors photographed at the site of the shooting, Wounded in America, was paired with first person accounts compiled and edited by the writer, Stephanie Arena. WIA was exhibited at the University of Chicago, 2004, the National Civil Rights Museum, Memphis, 2006, University of California, Los Angeles, 2008, and Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, 2009.

Driftless: Landscape Interventions in Southwest Wisconsin Within densely wooded hillsides, now overgrown pastures, amid order of tended fields, I witnessed a landscape transformed by seasons and by measured entropy in nature and built environments. The photographs made on this terrain mark my frequent returns to the Driftless Region of Southwest Wisconsin, a unique topography that escaped glaciation during the last Ice Age, a phenomenon that created steep hills, river valleys and limestone bluffs. With a 160-acre dairy farm, five generations of my family committed a Driftless Region property to productive use on our curvilinear land. The photographs made on this land over twelve years are experiments testing the integration of visual expressions with this landscape, with objects long identified by me with a sense of this place. The photographs examine the singular strength of still photography to signify place and time. Each photograph recalls a passed wish to create a brief intervention with nature’s own order.

Emilia Martin

Emilia Martin is a Polish artist and photographer based in The Hague. Rooted in ancestral storytelling, she weaves narratives that challenge binaries of truth and fiction through photography, writing, sound, and sculpture. Her work explores myths, rituals, and oral histories, and their role in shaping human and more-than-human relations. She graduated from the MA Photography&Society at the Royal Academy of Art (2022). Her work "I saw a tree bearing stones in the place of apples and pears" (published by Yogurt Editions, 2024) was exhibited internationally, including at Rencontres d’Arles and Fotofestiwal Łódź. She co-founded the feminist radio collective Radio Echo.

"The Serpen'ts Thread" (2024 - now) As a child, I spent countless hours observing my beloved grandmother, a Polish countryside textile worker, stitching together scraps into things that were new, wonderful, and soft. Like a storyteller weaving elements into a tale, her textiles combined many fibers, threads, and pieces of material. Never formally educated to write due to gender politics, her textile works became her language, carrying the knowledge of generations of women before me. Yet after she passed away, her textiles—perceived as having no value—were discarded or lost. Inspired by this missing archive, I began tracing histories of women whose textiles speak where records fall silent, continuing an intergenerational legacy of weaving scraps into stories. “The Serpent’s Thread” follows fragmented records and folklore surrounding the five Andersson sisters from Åsmundtorp in early 20th-century Sweden. Their story centers on elaborate dowry textiles meant to demonstrate skill, diligence, and moral worth. Yet all but one never married; their unused, preserved works parallel my grandmother’s—an ambiguous archive of domestic labour and expectation. Like a textile of many threads, the project merges documentation with myth, reconstructing layered (hi)stories of women makers, rebels, and those whose voices were devalued or lost.