Join us for a fast-paced presentation by a unique group of cross-disciplined Photoville artists as they reveal their sources of creativity.
Presenters: Laylah Amatullah Barrayn Shiho Fukada Courtney Garvin Sebastián Hidalgo Smriti Keshari Patricia Lay-Dorsey Griselda San Martin Nate Larson Sgt. Matthew Callahan Dave Shelley
Location: Brooklyn Bridge Park – Water Street
Presented by:
Producers and co-founders Marcel Saba, Amy Wolff and Mathieu Young are pleased to bring you Inspired Live at Photoville. Join us for a fast-paced presentation by a unique group of cross-disciplined Photoville artists as they reveal their sources of creativity. Inspired by PechaKucha presentations, each speaker selects 15 images which stays on screen for 20 seconds each, creating a dynamic 6-minute presentation. What inspires their work? A person, place, idea or object?
Laylah Amatullah Barrayn is a documentary photographer and writer. She is the co-author of the independently published MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora, the first anthology in nearly 30 years that highlights photography produced by women of African descent. Barrayn is a frequent contributor to the New York Times. Her work has been included in books like Black: A Celebration of a Culture edited by Dr. Deborah Willis, Photography, A Feminist History by Emma Lewis, and Streams of Consciousness: Bamako Encounters — African Biennale of Photography edited by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung.
Barrayn’s personal and professional projects have taken her from Minneapolis to Malaysia to Martinique to Mauritania, among many global locales where she focuses her inquiries on Black diasporic communities with a special interest in religious traditions, aesthetics and the experiences of women. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, with solo exhibitions at the Museum of the African Diaspora San Francisco and the Taubman Museum of Art (VA). In 2018, she was included as one of the Royal Photographic Society’s (UK) Hundred Heroines. Barrayn earned an M.A. from New York University. She is currently working on a book on contemporary Black photographers.
Photo Credit: Alex Bershaw
Shiho Fukada is a filmmaker and photojournalist, producing and shooting underreported stories in video and photography.
She worked in advertising and fashion industry in New York before pursuing her career as a photographer. After living in the U.S. over the last decade, she brought her attention back to her home country of Japan.
Her multimedia work “Japan’s Disposable Workers”, depicting the plight of Japanese workers during the periods of economic stagnation, received a World Press Photo Multimedia award and was nominated for an Emmy. Other recognitions include The Visa d’Or – Daily Press award at Visa pour l’Image Perpignan, PDN Storytellers’ Grand Prize, The Society of Publishers in Asia Awards, Best of Photojournalism, and Days Japan International Photojournalism Award. She is also a recipient of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting Grant, the Alicia Patterson Fellowship, and The Howard G. Buffett Fund for Women Journalists, International Women’s Media Foundation.
She has a BA in English Literature from Sophia University in Tokyo and a diploma in Multimedia Journalism from Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines.
Courtney Garvin is a visual artist born in South Carolina who is currently based in New York City. She received her B.S. in communications and rhetoric with a minor in art photography from Syracuse University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts. She is a Magnum Foundation 2018 Photography & Social Justice Fellow. Her work examines portrayals across various mediums. She also has a deep interest in family histories, memory, storytelling, and sex education.
Documentary photography presented its importance to Sebastián Hidalgo in Mexico in 2008. At the tender-age of twelve he adopted the roll of the observer to witnesses the passing of his grandfather for his absent family members. It was this experience which formulated his devotions to photojournalism and taught him to photograph with empathy and willingness to grow in conjunction with the lives he finds in front of his camera.
Sebastián Hidalgo is a 23-year-old, freelance visual journalist and reporter based in the Chicago and the Midwest. His work focuses the social and systemic pressures and issues in many of Chicago’s Black and Latino communities. Hidalgo began his professional career freelancing for hyper local news outlets such as Austin Weekly News, Wednesday Journal, and Forest Park Review and interned with The Chicago Reporter during the city’s most violent year and the 2016 presidential elections .
In 2017, he was selected as City Bureau–a community-oriented, civic-journalism lab–photojournalist fellowship, where he focused on the social and cultural impacts of gentrification in his home community of Pilsen. The project,“The Quietest Form of Displacement in a Changing Barrio” was featured on the New York Times – Lens, New York Times Race/Related instagram page, Roads & Kingdoms, BESE Media. And has been awarded with Peter Lisagor Award at Headline Club Chicago for Best of Photography in 2017, a finalist for Best photojournalism in the National Association of Hispanic Journalism-Chicago, Second Place for Feature photography from Illinois Press Association, and more.
Today, Hidalgo continues to freelance for hyper-local and national publication such as In These Times, Chicago Magazine, Belt Magazine, The Chicago Reader, Youth Radio, Illinois Humanities and Chicago Public Media-WBEZ, where he currently works as their digital producer.
Smriti Keshari is best known for her acclaimed multi-media installation, the bomb, which was heralded as “a stunning, avant-garde approach to a plea for nuclear disarmament.”
She is an Indian-American director and artist whose work covers a spectrum of the moving image from traditional, linear filmmaking to art installations. She brings an experimental approach to exploring under-represented themes and experiences outside the mainstream, which spark social dialogue.
Patricia Lay-Dorsey is a Detroit-based humanist photographer. She is the 2015 Critical Mass Rauschenberg Residency award winner and has had her self-portraits of living with multiple sclerosis published in the 2013 book “Falling Into Place.” She was chosen by Time.com as the Michigan representative in their feature ‘Instagram Photographers to Follow in All 50 States,’ and has had solo exhibitions around the US and China. But she will probably be remembered less as a photographer than as ‘Grandma Techno,’ the name that she was first given by fans at Movement Detroit 2007 and—thanks to social media and the internet—has become famous among electronic music lovers across the globe.
Griselda San Martin is a Spanish documentary photographer currently based in New York City. She is a graduate of the Documentary Photography and Photojournalism program at the International Center of Photography (ICP), and holds a Masters in Journalism from the University of Colorado, Boulder.
San Martin’s work challenges popular assumptions about immigrants, and offers an alternative perspective―a marginalized community demonstrating resilience and resourcefulness amidst trying situations.
Her photography and video projects have been exhibited internationally and featured in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Republic, and California Sunday Magazine, as well as other publications.
Nate Larson is one half of the Larson Shindelman collaboration. Their projects have been widely exhibited across the US and internationally, including an upcoming commissioned solo exhibition for the George Eastman Museum (opening January 2019) and past solo exhibitions at Filter Space Chicago (2016), the Orlando Museum of Art (2013), Blue Sky Center for Photographic Arts (2012), and the Contemporary Arts Center Las Vegas (2011). Their artwork is included in the collections of the High Museum Atlanta, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Orlando Museum of Art, Portland Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Their first monograph was published by Flash Powder Projects in 2016.
United Photo Industries (UPI) is a New York based nonprofit organization that works to promote a wider understanding of, and increased access to, the art of photography.
Since its founding in 2011, UPI has rapidly solidified its position in the public art landscape by continuing to showcase thought-provoking, challenging, and exceptional photography from across the globe. In its first seven years, UPI has presented the work of more than 2,500 visual artists in gallery exhibitions and public art installations worldwide.
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