Featuring:
Provincetown Artists: Luca Amorese, Russell Avery, Estella Boulin, Jada Buchanan, Riley Burch, Nathaly Carmona-Millan, Daequann Channer, Kasey Cox, Lucille Edwards, Brady Enck, DeMario Ferguson, Javi Ganas, Jayla Graybill, Jon Gunn, Layla GuyetteMilo Harrington, Nora Harrington, Quinn Ivey, Raea Ivey, Hattie Lawless, Marquez Manderson, Bettina Markowski, Deborah Markowski, Shania Marriot, Marlee McKernan, Steven Meserve, Ezra Moore, Luciano Morales, Lena Nichols, Matthew Peres, Kayalee Powell, Ryder Rego, Daisy Rios, Dante Rios, Ella Scandurra, Lola Schiffer-Kehou, Zach Selvia, Amelia Stackpole, Brandon Stefani, Asa Valli, Brianna Walker, Bella Wirthwein, Kimora Wright, and Wesley Yazel.
Newtok/Mertarvik Artists: Lola Andy, Daisy Carl, Glennesha Carl, Kaliegh Charles, Larry Charles, Rayna Charles, Fallyn Connelly, Jojean George, Jenna Flynn, Samuel John, Thaddeus John, Aaliyah Kasaiuli, Mercedes Paniyak, Leilani Queenie.
Lessons from Newtok is a photography and writing exchange connecting youth from Newtok, Alaska and Provincetown, Massachusetts—two coastal communities impacted by climate change. Through shared storytelling, students explore how warming temperatures, erosion, and increasing storm surges are altering their homes and futures.
As members of the first community in the US forced to relocate because of climate change, the Newtok students bring firsthand knowledge of what it means to move an entire village—physically, emotionally, and culturally—and build new infrastructure from the ground up. By sharing their experiences with peers in Provincetown, they bring national attention to their reality and underscore the gravity of their relocation. For Provincetown students, forming personal connections with youth from Newtok transforms abstract data into lived experience and helps them recognize the urgent relevance of climate adaptation in their own backyard.
Led by photographers Katie Baldwin Basile (AK) and Emily Schiffer (MA), with mentorship support from KYUK Public Media, students are documenting their communities through photography, research-based writing, and ongoing correspondence. Their work highlights the impacts of climate change and the grassroots efforts underway to prepare, adapt, and protect what matters most. Stories from this exchange are being shared through local media, ensuring that their voices are included in the national climate conversation.
About the Artists
About the Newtok Students
The students of Newtok, Alaska are among the first young people in the United States to grow up at the epicenter of climate-induced relocation. As members of a Yup’ik Alaska Native community who have faced rapid erosion, thawing permafrost, and flooding, they bring lived experience and deep cultural knowledge to the national climate conversation. These students are not only witnesses to the transformation of their ancestral land—they are active participants in documenting and shaping their community’s future.
Through the Lessons from Newtok project, they are using photography and writing to share their stories of resilience, adaptation, and identity with peers across the country. Their work offers a rare and urgent perspective on what it means to rebuild a community from the ground up—while holding onto the traditions, values, and relationships that define it.
About the Provincetown Students
The students of Provincetown, Massachusetts come from a vibrant coastal community with a long history of art, activism, and resilience in the face of change. Living at the outermost edge of Cape Cod, they are witnessing firsthand how erosion, larger storm surges, and increasingly volatile weather patterns are reshaping their town and way of life.
Through Lessons from Newtok, Provincetown students are exploring what climate adaptation looks like in their own backyard—and what it means to take action before it’s too late. Their stories reflect a growing awareness that the climate crisis affects everyone, but not equally—and that solidarity, creativity, and youth leadership are powerful tools for change.
About Katie Baldwin Basile
Katie Baldwin Basile is a photojournalist and documentary filmmaker based in Bethel, Alaska, with a focus on climate change and community-driven storytelling. For over a decade, Katie has collaborated with communities across the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta to document the impacts of the climate crisis. Her work has appeared in PBS NewsHour, NPR, The Washington Post Magazine, The New York Times, and High Country News.
Katie’s career began as a teaching artist, and she has continued to partner with youth in the region, supporting their efforts in multimedia storytelling. From Yup’ik kayak building to the high teacher turnover rate, youth-led storytelling continues to expand Katie’s understanding of traditional and contemporary rural Alaska.
Katie is a We, Women and IWMF grantee and co-recipient of a National Edward R. Murrow Award for excellence in video through her work at KYUK Public Media. She also directed the award-winning short film To Keep as One, created in collaboration with the Newtok Village Council, which premiered at the 2020 Big Sky Film Festival. Katie lives in Bethel with her husband and two young sons.
About Emily Schiffer
Emily Schiffer is a Provincetown-based photographer whose work explores the intersection of art, community engagement, and social change. Emily is a Co-Founder and Creative Director of We, Women, the largest social impact photography project by womxn in the United States. She also co-created See Potential, a public art initiative on Chicago’s South Side, and Danube Revisited: The Inge Morath Truck Project, a mobile exhibition tracing the Danube River.
Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as the Upper Austrian Museum of Contemporary and Modern Art (Austria), Fotografie Forum Frankfurt (Germany), and the Cultural Center of the Philippines. Publications include: Aperture, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, PDN, TIME, the Washington and Mother Jones. Emily’s awards include a Fulbright Fellowship, The Inge Morath Award, and the Arnold Newman Prize, and she has received grants from Magnum Foundation, The Open Society Foundation, and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. She holds an MFA from the University of Michigan and a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, and is on the faculty at ICP and SVA in New York.
Organizations
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Photoville
Founded in 2011 in Brooklyn, NY, Photoville was built on the principles of addressing cultural equity and inclusion, which we are always striving for, by ensuring that the artists we exhibit are diverse in gender, class, and race.
In pursuit of its mission, Photoville produces an annual, city-wide open air photography festival in New York City, a wide range of free educational community initiatives, and a nationwide program of public art exhibitions.
By activating public spaces, amplifying visual storytellers, and creating unique and highly innovative exhibition and programming environments, we join the cause of nurturing a new lens of representation.
Through creative partnerships with festivals, city agencies, and other nonprofit organizations, Photoville offers visual storytellers, educators, and students financial support, mentorship, and promotional & production resources, on a range of exhibition opportunities.
For more information about Photoville visit, www.photoville.com
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PhotoWings
PhotoWings believes that photography has the power to influence the world. As such, we invest in strategic collaborations and programs that help make photography better understood, created, utilized, seen and saved. We also have a rich archive with hundreds of hours of original interviews and partner presentations from both within and outside the photo world, as well as curricula, tool kits, resources and community activities. We believe that meaningful engagement with photography can foster deep thinking, communication and help people better understand and navigate the world.
PhotoWings has been a proud partner of the Eddie Adams Workshop since 2015 and Photoville since 2017.
Lessons from Newtok
Featuring: Various Artists
Curated by: Katie Baldwin Basile Emily Schiffer Zianne Agustin
Locations
View Location Details Brooklyn Bridge Park – Emily Warren Roebling Plaza1 Water St
Brooklyn, NY 11201
This location is part of Brooklyn Bridge Park
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Recipient of the 2025 Photoville & PhotoWings Educator Exhibition Grant.
This project is supported by: Anonymous Was a Woman in partnership with The New York Foundation for the Arts, a Photoville Educator’s Grant, the Newtok Village Council, Lower Kuskokwim School District, Fox Air, International Teaching Artist Collective, the Provincetown School District, The Massachusetts Cultural Council, JKW Foundation, and KYUK.
Special thanks to Gabby Hiestand Salgado for youth mentorship and video production, to Alice Rearden and Mark Adams for curriculum guidance, to teachers Amy Rokicki, Naomi Olson, Michael Gillane, Elizabeth Andy, and Nancy Flasher for welcoming us into your classrooms throughout the year, and to Superintendent Gerry Goyette and principals Elizabeth Francis and Dawn Lloyd for opening your schools to us and supporting this project.
The views and opinions expressed in this exhibit are those of the exhibition artists and partners and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Photoville or any other participants and partners of the Photoville Festival.
