Mackenzie Calle is a creative documentary photographer and artist who uses storytelling to largely explore forgotten histories and queer experiences. Driven by a deep passion to understand how the past influences the future, her work often uses surreal imagery and manipulated archival material to question what we hold true and examine the story that archives reveal.
Her long-term project, The Gay Space Agency, addresses the inequities for the LGBTQIA+ community in astronautics. Reckoning with a history that required astronauts to take heterosexuality tests, this work visualizes a community that has been excluded from space. The project was awarded the Magnum Foundation Counter Histories Grant and was shortlisted for the PhMuseum Women Photographers Grant.
She grew up as an athlete who was passionate about science and television. This led her to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts where she majored in Cinema Studies and was a member of the school’s volleyball team. For over five years she worked as a photography producer, editor, and photographer at NBCUniversal across networks that include NBC, Bravo, MSNBC, CNBC, and NBC News. In 2021, she was awarded the Director’s Fellowship to attend the Documentary Photography and Visual Journalism program at the International Center of Photography. She is currently a freelance photographer and artist based in Brooklyn. NY.
The Gay Space Agency confronts the American space program’s historical exclusion of openly queer astronauts, reimagining a history of the space program that celebrates queerness and highlights LGBTQIA+ role models.
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