Tara Pixley

Tara Pixley, Ph.D. (b. 1983) (she/her) is a queer, first generation Jamaican-American photographer, curator, and educator based in Los Angeles. She is an assistant professor of journalism at Loyola Marymount University. She was a 2021 IWMF NextGen Fellow, a 2020 awardee of the inaugural World Press Photo Solutions Visual Journalism Initiative, and a 2016 Visiting Knight Fellow at Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism. Her writing and photography have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, Newsweek, ProPublica, HuffPost, Nieman Reports, ESPN Magazine, CanonPro, and the Black Scholar, among many others. Her filmic and photographic work intersect with her scholarship and advocacy, each addressing the intersectionality of race, gender, class, visual rhetoric, and the potential for visual media to reimagine marginalized communities. She is on the board of stock photo co-op Stocksy United, and serves as secretary of the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) board. She is also a co-founder and director of Authority Collective — an organization dedicated to establishing equity in visual media.

The Authority Collective

The Authority Collective is a group of womxn, non-binary, and gender expansive people of color, reclaiming our authority in lens-based visual media. As professionals in the photography, film, and VR/AR industries, our mission is to empower artists with resources and community, and to take action against systemic and individual abuses, in the world of lens-based visual work. Our goal is to remove barriers to access for BIPOC entering editorial, journalism, documentary, commercial, and fine art careers.

The Authority Collective connects our community members with job, mentorship, networking, and professional development resources. We look to shift the power dynamic in traditional and independent media, so that the stories we tell, represent the true diversity of our world. We are establishing our power, to set standards that challenge colonial narratives, and the notions of success.