Monica Bravo
Princeton University
Monica Bravo is an assistant professor in the Department of Art and Archaeology. She specializes in the history of photography and the modern art of the Americas.
Her first book, Greater American Camera: Making Modernism in Mexico, was published by Yale University Press in June 2021, with support from the Terra and Wyeth Foundations for American Art. The book examines exchanges between U.S. modernist photographers—including Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, Paul Strand, and Helen Levitt—and modern Mexican artists working in painting, poetry, music, photography, and film, resulting in the development of a Greater American modernism in the interwar period. This research was supported by fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the Center for Creative Photography, the Georgia O’Keeffe Research Center, the Harry Ransom Center, the Huntington Library and Art Collections, and the Terra Foundation for American Art. It was short-listed for a Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the College Art Association (CAA).
Bravo’s current research project, “Silver Pacific: A Mineral History of Early American Photography,” transforms the geographies typically associated with American photographic history to consider transpacific networks and overlapping ecologies. Informed by the environmental humanities and technical art history, her analysis looks not only at the surface of photographs as images, but through to the photographs as objects—material encrustations of regional mineral wealth, extracted by (often migrant) human labor. This research has been supported by a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society, a Beinecke Short-term Research Fellowship, a Getty/American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art, a John S. Aubrey Fellowship from the Newberry Library, and a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship.
Before coming to Princeton, Bravo was an assistant professor at the University of Southern California, an assistant professor at California College of the Arts, and a lecturer at Yale University. She was an inaugural co-chair of Photography Network, a CAA Affiliated Society.
Jennifer Calivas
Artist
Jennifer Calivas is an artist working with photography and performance. She makes her photographic work using analog processes and experimental darkroom techniques, prioritizing embodied ways of thinking and making. Her recent work consists of performative self-portraits as well as darkroom collages which investigate issues of agency and gender in relation to photography and to the natural environment. Calivas’ photographs have been exhibited at The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City; Light Work in Syracuse, New York; David Zwirner in New York City; LTD Los Angeles; Huxley Parlour in London and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland, Maine. She holds her MFA degree from Yale University and her undergraduate degree from The Evergreen State College. Her photographs are in the permanent collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art and The Museum of Modern Art.
Sara Cwynar
Artist
Devin Fore
Princeton University
Devin Fore’s work examines the media and cultural practices that connect the German and Russian avant-gardes to political movements. His first book Realism After Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature (October/MIT Press, 2012), which looks at the return of mimetic figuration in the late 1920s, was awarded the Modern Language Association’s prize for the best book in German Studies. His second book Soviet Factography: Reality without Realism (University of Chicago Press, 2024) moves between literature, film, photography, experimental psychology, and information theory to reconstruct the material and political milieux of the factographic avant-garde. His third book Mass Technics of the Document: Factography and Cultural Revolution (Verso Books, 2026) examines strategies of aesthetic deskilling and the massification of communication in the era of the cultural revolution. He is currently completing a shorter study History, A Procession of Peasants, which examines the pastoral impulse in the film, architecture, and urban planning of the 1920s through the lens of Engels’ Dialectic of Nature (pub. 1925). Devin also edited and wrote the introductory essay to the English translation of Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge’s History and Obstinacy (Zone Books, 2014), a book that continues to be on his mind.
Together with Matthew Witkovsky, Devin curated the exhibition Revoliutsiia! Demonstratsiia! Soviet Art Put to the Test, which ran at The Art Institute of Chicago in 2017. The same year he also curated a 28-session film series on Vertov and materialist cinema at the Reina Sofia/Filmoteca Española in Madrid.
Devin has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright, Humboldt and Whiting Foundations, and Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities; he was also the Anna Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 2008–2009.
With Beatriz Colomina, Devin currently directs Princeton’s Program in Media & Modernity and he chairs the Committee for Film Studies. He is an Associate Faculty member of the departments of Art and Archaeology, Comparative Literature, and Slavic Languages and Literatures, and he serves on the executive committees of the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities, the Gauss Seminars in Criticism, and the Center for Digital Humanities; he is also affiliated with the Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.
Devin is an editor of the journals October and New German Critique as well as a contributing editor to Germanic Review and The German Quarterly. He has translated numerous texts from both German and Russian.
Leslie Hewitt
Artist
Leslie Hewitt’s hybrid approach to photography and sculpture revisits the still life genre from a post-minimalist perspective. Her geometric compositions, which she frames and crystallizes through the disciplines of photography and film theory, respectively, are spare assemblages of ordinary effects and materials, suggesting the porosity between intimate and sociopolitical histories. Whether discreetly arranged in layers on wooden planks or stacked before a wall in her studio, Hewitt’s objects often include personal mementos such as family pictures, as well as books and vintage magazines that reference the black literary and popular-culture ephemera of her upbringing. Interested in the mechanisms behind the construction of meaning and memory, she decisively challenges both by unfolding manifestly formal, rather than didactic, connections in her heteroclite juxtapositions. She puts pressure on physical space as the ultimate frame of her photo sculptures by displaying some of them leaning against a wall, as they were originally conceived. Hewitt further works with site-specific installation and film as modalities to contend equally with the notions of space and time.
Lucy Kim
Boston University
Lucy Kim is an interdisciplinary artist working across painting, sculpture and biological media. In her hybrid works, she embraces distortion as a tool to deconstruct how we see what we see, and the relationship between our evolved vision-centricity and socially constructed hierarchies. Kim is a recipient of a 2024 Howard Foundation Fellowship and a 2022 Creative Capital Award for her project printing images with bacteria that has been genetically-modified to produce melanin. Kim has exhibited her work at the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore among others. Kim is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is Associate Professor of Art at Boston University.
Deana Lawson
Artist
Princeton University
Deana Lawson’s work negotiates knowledge of selfhood through a corporeal dimension. Her photographs speak to the ways that sexuality, violence, family, and social status may be written, sometimes literally, on the body. Lawson utilizes a wide spectrum of photographic languages: staged imagery, loose documentary, appropriated pictures given to her by her subjects, or images she discovers in the media. These different modes of photographic production, whether staged or found, feed into the ongoing narratives that Lawson engages. As musician and critic Greg Tate wrote recently, “What you see in [Lawson’s] work is photographer as cultural anthropologist but also as cultural vivisectionist and forensic curator. Her practice subtly contests the suppression of Black visual epistemologies — as much through absence as presence, withheld information as much cultural saturation bombing. Drawing the spectators eye to how people command space within the frame, how they proclaim ownership of selfhood before the camera is a recurring motif. Her work seems always about the desire to represent social intimacies that defy stereotype and pathology while subtly acknowledging the vitality of lives abandoned by the dominant social order.”
Deana Lawson’s work was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, New Photography 2011 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and she had a solo exhibition at The Art Institute of Chicago in 2015. She has participated in group exhibitions at The Studio Museum, Harlem; MoMA P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center; Artists Space, New York; and the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta. Gallery shows include Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York; Helene Bailly Gallery, Paris; and Light Work Gallery, Syracuse, New York. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, TIME Magazine, BOMB, The Collector’s Guide to New Art Photography, Photo District News, Time Out New York, Contact Sheet #154, and PQ Journal for Contemporary Photography. Lawson is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the John Gutmann Photography Fellowship, a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant, an Aaron Siskind Fellowship Grant, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant. In 2020, she became the first photographer to receive the prestigious Hugo Boss Prize. In 2022, Lawson received the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, considered to be among the most important photography awards. Deana has participated in the Workspace residency at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Light Work residency in Syracuse, and the Visual Studies Workshop residency in Rochester, New York.
Deana began teaching at Princeton in 2012. She has taught at California College of Arts, San Francisco; the International Center for Photography, New York; and the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. She earned a B.F.A. from Penn State University and an M.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design. Deana was born in Rochester, New York, and currently lives and works in the heart of the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn.
An-My Lê
Artist
Bard College
An-My Lê was born in Saigon, Vietnam in 1960. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She was educated at Stanford University and at Yale University and has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Mac Arthur Foundation Fellowship (2012); the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2009); and the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1997), amongst others. Lê is currently the Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts at Bard College, New York.
As a teenager Lê fled Vietnam with her family in 1975. They eventually settled in the United States as refugees. Her work often addresses the impact of war on culture and on the environment. Lê says her “main goal is to try to photograph landscape in such a way that it suggests a universal history, a personal history, a history of culture.”
In 2021 a major exhibition opened at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and travelled to the Milwaukee Art Museum in Wisconsin and the Amon Carter Museum of Art in Texas. Other solo exhibitions of Lê’s work have been presented at the Sheldon Art Museum, Lincoln, Nebraska (2017); Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg, Sweden (2015); Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland (2013); Dia: Beacon, New York (2008); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California (2008); and MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York (2002).
Her work has also been included in the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017) and the Taipei Biennial (2014 and 2006). She has been included in numerous international group shows including at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota (2019); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2017); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2016); National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan (2015); Tate Modern, London (2014); Brooklyn Museum (2012); and the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010) among others.
Richard Mosse
Artist
Philip Guston Rome Prize Fellow
Richard Mosse (b. 1980, Ireland) is an artist who has consistently documented historically significant subjects using photographic techniques that mediate and foreground elements of these narratives. He was awarded the Prix Pictet (2017), the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize (2014), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2011). He earned an MFA in Photography from Yale School of Art (2008), a PG Dip in Fine Art from Goldsmiths (2005), an MRes in Cultural Studies and Humanities (2003) and a first-class honors BA in English Literature and Language from Kings College London (2001). His work has been exhibited at the National Gallery of Art, the Barbican Art Gallery, Louisiana Museum, SFMOMA, the National Gallery of Victoria, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Akademie der Künste, MAST Foundation, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, ICA Boston, and represented Ireland at the 55th Venice Biennale. He is currently the Philip Guston Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.
Arthur Ou
Parsons School of Design
2024 Guggenheim Fellow
Arthur Ou is a Taiwanese-American artist and educator based in Queens, New York. He has held solo exhibitions at venues including Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens, Greece (2019), Kathryn Brennan Gallery, New York (2017, 2015, 2013), IT Park Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan (2010, 2005), and Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2000). Ou’s work has been included in group exhibitions at the Grazer Kunstverein, Austria, LAXART, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, the Presentation House, Vancouver, and the Queens Museum. His work was included in the 2012 Daegu Photography Biennial, the 2013 and 2018 Queens International, and the 2006 and 2023 Taipei Biennial. His work has been written about in Artforum, Art in America, The New York Times, and the New Yorker, and has appeared in Aperture, Blind Spot, Camera Austria, and The Photograph as Contemporary Art. He has written critical texts in Aperture, Art in America, Foam, and Osmos. Ou’s publications include The World Is All That Is the Case, an artist book published by Roma Publications in association with designer Julie Peeters. He received his MFA from Yale University School and is an associate professor of photography at Parsons School of Design, a division of the New School. Ou is a 2024 Guggenheim fellow in photography.
Trevor Paglen
Artist
Trevor Paglen is an artist whose work spans image-making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, engineering, and numerous other disciplines.
Paglen’s work has had one-person exhibitions at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington D.C.; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Fondazione Prada, Milan; the Barbican Centre, London; Vienna Secession, Vienna; and Protocinema Istanbul, and participated in group exhibitions the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, and numerous other venues.
Paglen has launched an artwork into distant orbit around Earth in collaboration with Creative Time and MIT, contributed research and cinematography to the Academy Award-winning film Citizenfour, and created a radioactive public sculpture for the exclusion zone in Fukushima, Japan.
Paglen is the author of several books and numerous articles on subjects including experimental geography, artificial intelligence, state secrecy, military symbology, photography, and visuality. Paglen’s work has been profiled in the New York Times, New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, Financial Times, Art Forum, and Aperture. In 2014, he received the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award and in 2016, he won the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. Paglen was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2017.
Paglen holds a B.A. from U.C. Berkeley, an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in Geography from U.C. Berkeley.
Matthew Schreiber
Artist
Matthew Schreiber produces work in a wide variety of mediums, including drawing, performance, sculpture, video, and light, mostly known for his work with Holography and Laser Light Sculptures. Recurring subjects within Schreiber’s work center on novelty, the occult, and spectacle by using tools of physics, technology and perception. View Schreiber’s work at PST Art: Getty Museum: Sculpting with Light: Contemporary Artists and Holography
David Benjamin Sherry
Artist
David Benjamin Sherry (b. 1981, Stony Brook, New York; lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico) is an artist working to challenge and reinvigorate the American Western landscape tradition by examining our complex interconnection with the natural world, with an emphasis on preservation, queer identity, color and magic.
He received his BFA in Photography from RISD in 2003 and his MFA in Photography from Yale University in 2007, where he was awarded the Richard Dixon Welling Prize. In 2010 he received the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Visual Arts Grant. A multi-part installation of his work was exhibited in Greater New York 2010 at MoMA PS1, New York.
His work has been exhibited in numerous solo presentations and also included in many group presentations including: “Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene” at the Nasher Museum of Art (2024); “Expanding Identities of Artists from the American West” at Tucson Museum of Art (2022); “Ecstatic Land,” “Ballroom Marfa” (2022), “Ansel Adams In Our Time” at the Portland Art Museum and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (2021); “Color Fields” at MassArt Museum (2015); ”What is a Photograph?” at ICP New York (2014); and “The Anxiety of Photography” at the Aspen Art Museum (2011).
Sherry’s work is in permanent collections at The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Nasher Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, Wexner Center of the Arts, LACMA, The RISD Museum, The Saatchi Collection, Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Georgia Museum of Art.
A.L. Steiner
Yale University
A.L. Steiner utilizes constructions of photography, video, installation, collage, collaboration, performance, writing, pedagogy and curatorial work as seductive tropes channeled through the sensibility of a skeptical queer ecofeminist androgyne. Based in New York, Steiner is co-curator of Ridykeulous, co-founder of Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.), and faculty at Yale University’s School of Art.
Lisa Sutcliffe
Curator, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Lisa Sutcliffe is Curator in the Department of Photographs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where her principal focus is post-1960s photography and time-based media. Sutcliffe develops and oversees the regular rotation of works in The Met collection on view in the Museum’s Menschel Hall for Modern Photographs.
Sutcliffe has organized many exhibitions, including a monumental commission with Derrick Adams entitled Our Time Together (2021); James Benning and Sharon Lockhart: Over Time (2019/2022); Susan Meiselas: Through a Woman’s Lens (2020); Sara Cwynar: Image Model Muse (2019); Naoya Hatakeyama: Natural Stories (2012); The Provoke Era: Postwar Japanese Photography (2009); and The San Quentin Project: Nigel Poor and the Men of San Quentin State Prison (2018), for which she organized a city-wide collaborative initiative on the role of the arts in criminal-justice reform. Sutcliffe has also acquired and shown film and video work by Charles Atlas, Rineke Dijkstra, Leslie Hewitt, Kahlil Joseph, Anthony McCall, and Ryan Trecartin. She has organized film screenings, lectures, and panels with internationally acclaimed artists and written about contemporary art and photography, including essays on Naoya Hatakeyama, Nigel Poor, and An-My Lê. Sutcliffe holds an MA in the history of art from Boston University and a BA in art history from Wellesley College.
Previously, she served as Herzfeld Curator of Photography and Media Art at the Milwaukee Art Museum, as Assistant Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and she held a curatorial fellowship at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, in Lincoln, Massachusetts.
Jeff Whetstone
Princeton University
Jeff Whetstone’s photographs and films imagine America through lenses of anthropology and mythology. Whetstone’s Post-Pleistocene series illuminate the depths of wild caves in Alabama and Tennessee where layers of human markings reveal millennia of cultural evolution. His ongoing New Wilderness project portrays a human-centric American wilderness and questions how our cultural connection to the wild is revealed in contemporary times. Whetstone’s artwork investigates the role gender, geography, and heritage play in defining the human position in the natural world. A self-described biologist at heart, Whetstone explores the cyclical and evolving narrative of landscapes that are not merely a setting for human activity but a force that compels humans to adapt. His work varies considerably with each project, but he always addresses the particularities of a place and explores interplay between geography and human experience. For Whetstone, the natural world is a cultural experience and the built environment is firmly, yet problematically, situated within the web of nature.
Over the course of his academic career, Whetstone has been the recipient of numerous prizes including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007. His work has been exhibited internationally and has received reviews in ArtForum, Art in America, Frieze, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Los Angeles Times. Whetstone first exhibited video work in 2011 when his experimental narrative short, On the Use of Syrinx, premiered at the Moving Image Festival in New York. A second exhibition in 2011 at Julie Saul Gallery titled Seducing Birds, Snakes, and Men introduced Whetstone’s work in animation and video to a wide audience. Whetstone earned his M.F.A. from the Yale School of Photography in 2001, where he was the recipient of the George Sakier Prize for Photography. His work is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Nasher Museum, Nelson Atkins Museum, Cleveland Art Museum, Yale Art Gallery, New York Public Library, and many others.
Whetstone earned a Bachelor of Science in Zoology and a certificate in Film Studies from Duke University and received his Master of Fine Arts from Yale. Prior to teaching and directing the Program in Visual Arts at Princeton, he served on the faculty at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.