Linda Johnson Dougherty is the Chief Curator & Curator of Contemporary Art at the North Carolina Museum of Art, where she is currently organizing exhibitions of contemporary art and developing artists’ projects for the Museum Park.  Prior to joining the staff at the North Carolina Museum of Art, she co-directed the public art program for the state of North Carolina for several years, and was a curator at The Phillips Collection, a research associate at the National Gallery of Art, and a research assistant at the National Museum of American Art in Washington, DC.  She has a BA in Art History from Wesleyan University and an MA in Art History from Williams College.

Leah Sobsey is an artist, Assistant Professor of Photography and Director of the Gatewood Gallery at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Sobsey’s photo-based work explores the natural world through archives and taxonomies with an experimental and materials-based approach to the medium of photography with a specialty in plant based printing practices. Using historical, scientific, and artistic lenses, she aims to understand the connection to plant and animal loss as one indication of the larger climatological perils we face as a species.

She is interested in creating dialog between art and science and has spent the last decade-plus photographing specimens from National Park and University museum collections across the country to understand climate change and species loss.

Sobsey works in 19th-century photographic processes combined with digital technology. She exhibits internationally in galleries, public spaces, and museums; she currently has work in the Art on Paper exhibition at the Weatherspoon Art Museum and a forthcoming exhibition at The Harvard Museum of Natural History in 2022, documenting species loss through Henry David Thoreau’s herbarium. Her recent installations were exhibited at The Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, California, The Weatherspoon Art Museum, The Nasher Museum of Art, The Moss Center at Virginia Tech, The Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, Colorado, The Fence Durham, the world’s largest photography public art exhibition in the world, and Rayko Photo Gallery in San Francisco, California, which also featured her first monograph, Collections, released in July 2016 by Daylight Books. Her work is held in private and public collections across the country, including the North Carolina Museum of Art, Bill Gates-Microsoft, Fidelity Investments, Cassihaus, Duke Hospital, Duke Raleigh Hospital, Maine Media College, Rose Community Foundation Denver and many more.  Her images have appeared in New Yorker.com, the Paris Review Daily, Slate.com, Hyperallergic.com, The Telegraph, and many more. Sobsey is a founding member of LEA, a mission-based company that transforms nature’s fragile specimens into cloth-based modern wearable art for everyday living. LEA is committed to using materials that are natural, locally-produced, and carbon-neutral, and to support other women-owned businesses. Sobsey is also co-founder of the Visual History Collaborative and part of the documentary team that produced the best-selling Daylight Book, Bull City Summer, published in 2013. She received her BA from Guilford College and MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute.

Michael is represented in galleries across the country, a frequent exhibition juror and curator, portfolio reviewer, and speaker on the business of fine art photography. When not in South Carolina he can be found leading photographic expeditions in Death Valley and the Eastern Sierras

Dale Rio is a visual artist whose film and historic process photographic work explores issues such as mortality, human and societal constructs, and humanity’s relationship with the natural world.  Her work has been shown extensively in the U.S., as well as in England, Germany, and New Zealand.  Her images reside in private collections and have been reproduced in countless publications.  A Fulbright scholar, Dale has also attended residencies at Penland School of Crafts, the Studios at Mass MoCA, and the Farmington Valley Arts Center.

In 2015, Dale co-founded The Halide Project, a Philadelphia-based non-profit whose mission is the support of practitioners of film and historic process photography.   She currently serves on their working board, developing educational programming and curating exhibitions.  Dale recently launched Point A to Point B: analog explorations, a bi-annual print publication featuring travel- and place-based analog photography.  She is also a founding member of a new global collective of women working in traditional photographic processes.

I currently have my eyes open for are film and historic process of just about any genre, but also specifically place-based (which could be conceptual, landscape, environmental portraiture, etc…  basically anything that tells a story of place through photos).

Blue Mitchell is an independent publisher, curator, educator, and photographer. Based in Portland, Oregon, he has been involved with many facets of the photographic arts. After Mitchell received his BFA from Oregon College of Art & Craft in 2005 he founded One Twelve Publishing.

One Twelve is most notably known for its fine art photographic print annual Diffusion (Est. 2009), which focuses on artfully-crafted, advant-garde photography. Additionally, One Twelve hosted Plates to Pixels online gallery for ten years (2007-2017), publishes the occasional artist book (Contact by Jake Shivery, 2015) and provides an extensive website with articles, galleries, and serial features.

Most recently, Mitchell launched a podcast where he chats with artists, curators, and writers working in the field of fine art photography.

Mitchell is interested in reviewing work focused on artfully crafted, avant-garde photography including mixed media, alt process, photo as an object, installation, book arts, and fine art concept work in both analog and digital formats. Opportunities include publication in Diffusion, physical Diffusion exhibitions, One Twelve website features, and maybe even guest invitations for The Diffusion Tapes podcast.

112pub.com

diffusiontapes.com

Portland, OR

Brian Piper is the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Assistant Curator of Photography at the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA). He completed his PhD in American Studies at the College of William and Mary in 2016, with the assistance of fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution and Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. His research focuses on twentieth century African American photography, vernacular uses of photographs, and histories of race and photography. Prior to his arrival in New Orleans, Piper held a variety of teaching and curatorial positions at the College of William and Mary, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and Valentine Richmond History Center. At NOMA, his curatorial credits include: You Are Here: A Brief History of Photography and Place (2019), Lee Friedlander in Louisiana (2018), Beyond the Frame: Photography and Native American Lives (2017), and the multi-media exhibition Changing Course: Reflections on New Orleans Histories, (2018).  He is currently developing an exhibition about the work of African American studio photographers during the Long Civil Rights Movement.

Work I’d like to see… I’m open to all kinds, but am especially interested in work that has an historical anchor and/or a contemporary social or political argument. That could range from explorations of individual identity to narrative projects to landscape studies.

(photo by R. Alokhin)

Dennis Kiel has been the Director of the Dishman Art Museum at Lamar University for the last 6 ½ years. He comes to the Dishman from Charlotte, North Carolina where he served as chief curator at The Light Factory Contemporary Museum of Photography and Film. Before joining The Light Factory, Kiel was the associate curator of prints, drawings, and photographs at the Cincinnati Art Museum for 24 years. He also taught the history of photography at Northern Kentucky University as an adjunct professor for a number of years.

He served as a member of the National Endowment for the Arts panel titled “American Masterpieces: Visual Arts Touring” and has participated in portfolio reviews at Houston Fotofest, “Our World” for Photo Alliance San Francisco, Photolucida, Review Santa Fe, Slow Exposures Photography Festival, Atlanta Celebrates Photography, Society for Photographic Education, and the Click! Photography Festival. He has also been a juror for Photolucida’s Critical Mass online competition from 2011-2019.

Recent photography exhibitions at the Dishman include Keith Carter-Fifty Years (2019), MUM: Nancy Newberry (2018), Intrusions of Grace: Anne Berry & Lori Vrba (2017), Jamey Stillings: The Evolution of Ivanpah Solar (2016), and Eliot Dudik: Broken Land | Still Lives (2015).

Kiel is interested in looking at basically all areas of photography, especially street photography, photojournalism, and portraiture. He is not interested in commercial work (primarily advertising). He can offer inspiration, advice on exhibitions and proper presentation, and can help photographers find a direction that will take their work to the next level.

Amethyst Rey Beaver is the Assistant Curator at 21c Museum Hotels where she works on curatorial projects for all nine 21c locations. From 2012-2016 she worked at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin on the Latin American and Modern & Contemporary curatorial teams on exhibitions, publications, and public programming. In 2010, Amethyst lived, worked, and studied in Valparaiso, Chile as a Fulbright Fellow. She received her B.A. from Wellesley College and her M.A. in Modern & Contemporary Latin American art history from the University of Texas at Austin.

Jonell Logan is an arts advocate dedicated to supporting the careers of contemporary artists. Originally from New York, Logan worked at several arts organizations including The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of Art; Studio Museum in Harlem. Moving South, she worked at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, SouthCarolina; and the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African American History and Culture in Charlotte, North Carolina.

In 2016, Jonell founded 300 Arts Project, an arts consulting company assisting culturally-based organizations develop strategic plans, as well as exhibition and public programs that are designed to create greater access for non-traditional audiences and emerging contemporary artists.

Jonell is the VP, Creative Director at McColl Center; an artist residency and contemporary arts space in Charlotte, NC.

Before becoming director of NC State University’s Gregg Museum of Art & Design in 2010, Roger Manley worked as a photographer, folklorist, filmmaker, curator and writer. He has curated exhibitions for more than forty other institutions, including some of the first exhibitions of outsider art in the South and three blockbuster exhibitions for the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, beginning with its inaugural show, Tree of Life. He has authored a number of award-winning books, catalogues, videos and films, and has produced exhibitions of his own photographs of Australian Aboriginals, Hispanic farmworkers, Palestinian villagers, Gullah Sea Islanders, Navajos, Arctic gold miners, and self-taught artists. His feature-length documentary co-directed with Peter Friedman, MANA—beyond belief, premiered at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam and at NYC’s Lincoln Center, and was an Official Selection at SXSW and an Opening Night Feature at both San Francisco DocFest and Durham’s Full Frame festival. Its many awards included Best Cinematography at the Avignon Film Festival and the Grand Jury Prize at Rhodes (www.mana-the-movie.com/mana.html)

  Manley has had artist residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts (California), the Fondation d’Art de La Napoule (France), and Mishkenot Sha’ananim (Israel), and was a recipient of both the NEA Artists Fellowship and the NEH Scholars Fellowship. He founded the biennial META Conferences at Black Mountain, which, over the past three decades, have brought together hundreds of artists, scientists and other creative individuals from all over the world for regular collaborative exchanges at the site of the former Black Mountain College. His most recent book (with Jonathan Williams and Guy Mendes) is Walks to the Paradise Garden, published in conjunction with the exhibition “Way Out There: The Art of Southern Backroads” at the High Museum in Atlanta, March 2 – May 19, 2019 (tinyurl.com/walkstotheparadisegarden). The Gregg Museum website is gregg.arts.ncsu.edu .

A native of New Orleans, Louisiana, Edward R. Hebert has been employed in the New Orleans Art community for over 28 years. Hebert’s educational background is in Photography, Painting and Sociology. He attended the New Orleans Center for Creative Art from 1977-1980 in the Visual Arts School and earned a BA in Fine Arts from the University of New Orleans in 1986. Edward Hebert has continued to study The History of Photography, Art History, Painting and Drawing following his formal education. Hebert was employed at A Gallery for Fine Photography, www.agallery.com, 1993-2020. His occupation was Gallery Director as well as governing the inventory, customer relations and relationships with the photographers represented by the gallery. This included being support for the financial workings of the gallery and the technological aspects of the business such as maintaining the gallery website, the gallery computer program which covered the financial and business aspects of photography sales. During his tenure at A Gallery for Fine Photography, Edward Hebert assisted in the curation of photography exhibitions for the gallery and sold photographs in New Orleans as well as Art Fairs in New York City, Basel Switzerland and Paris, France. Currently, Edward Hebert is creating his own business on line that will offer Art for sale and Consultation for Photographers and Artists of all mediums. https://www.edwardhebert.art/

Caitlin Margaret Kelly (she/her/hers) is the Curator of the Archive of Documentary Arts at the Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the Director of the Power Plant Gallery. As part of her role at Duke she engages with most stages of the documentary art process from advising undergraduate and graduate students, to curating and programming exhibitions with professional artists, and collecting work for long-term preservation. In addition to her MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University, she holds a Masters in Anthropology from California State University, Fullerton, and a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from Boston University.

Mark Sloan has been involved in the photography community since the early 1980’s in a variety of capacities–artist, curator, educator, project director, video producer, author, publisher, and editor.

While Director and Chief Curator of the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art from 1994-2020, Sloan curated dozens of photography exhibitions and originated many important photographic projects, often funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and other national funders. He organized Evon Streetman’s retrospective, which toured the US, and he curated the landmark exhibition No Man’s Land: Contemporary Photographers and Fragile Ecologies–featuring despoiled landscapes around the globe photographed by David Maisel, Emmet Gowin, and Edward Burtynsky in 2004. Prior to this tenure at the Halsey Institute, Sloan was Executive Director of the Light Factory in Charlotte, and Associate Director of San Francisco Camerawork. He holds an MFA in Photography from Virginia Commonwealth University and has exhibited his own photographic work all over the world including the Grand Palais in Paris and the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC. He has authored or co-authored 30 books, including many on photography subjects or photographers. He most recently co-curated Southbound: Photographs of and about the New South, which is currently on national tour. The book for the project won the prestigious Alice Award in 2019.

http://halsey.cofc.edu/

http://southboundproject.org/

Covid portrait of Mark Sloan by Tom Rankin

Ayşe Erginer (she/her) is a writer and editor with previous experience in television, documentary film, and women’s media. She is Executive Editor of the award-winning quarterly Southern Cultures (UNC Press) and currently serves as Acting Director of the UNC Center for the Study of the American South where it is housed. An avid photographer in her spare time, one of her photographs was featured in Tate Modern’s #LightDarkMatters exhibition, curated by Oliver Lang. She lives in Durham, NC.

E: helloayse @gmail.com

T: @ayse

IG: @ayse_e

Emily Earl is the Executive Director & co-founder of Sulfur Studios, a community artspace in Savannah, GA that is home to 26 artist studios, a fine art gallery, the ON::View Artist Residency Program and Community Darkroom. Emily is a fine art photographer and the owner/operator of Prismatic Prints, a fine art printshop. She has a BFA in Photography from SCAD and has recently published a photobook of her Late Night Polaroids series, documenting the nightlife of downtown Savannah, GA from 2012 to 2020.

Jennifer Sudul Edwards, Ph.D. received her doctorate from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, in 2014 with a dissertation on the early works of Niki de Saint Phalle under the advisement of Dr. Linda Nochlin and Robert Storr. Since July 2019 she has been the chief curator and curator of contemporary art at The Mint Museum. She has organized over 30 exhibitions and held curatorial positions at the Norton Simon Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, and the Annenberg Space for Photography, Los Angeles. Dr. Sudul Edwards has won numerous awards for her publications, exhibitions, and curatorial work, including an SEMC Publications Award for her Wrestling the Angel compendium and Charlotte Magazine’s “Best Curator” for 2017 and Charlottean of the Year in 2019. She is a cofounder and co-organizer of Sphere Series, Chairman of the Board at Goodyear Arts (2019-2021), Board Member at The Light Factory (2021- ), and on the AFA Advisory Committee at Central Piedmont Community College (2019- ). Her traveling exhibition W|ALLS: Defend, Divide, and the Divine, originally organized for the Annenberg Space for Photography, is on view at the Mint through July 2021.

(photo by Raymond Grubb)