Biennial Program Participants
Lindsay Albert, Program Manager, KADIST (San Francisco, CA)
Lindsay Albert is a curator and arts producer based in San Francisco, CA, currently serving as Program Manager at KADIST. Her career spans the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, and Minnesota Street Project. Albert has curated notable exhibitions including Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions presented at KADIST and the Blaffer Art Museum (Houston, TX), Natural Fictions at The Carnegie (Covington, KY), and produced solo presentations by Indira Allegra, Leila Weefer, and Ragnar Kjartansson. In 2023, Albert co-founded staircase, an alternative project space exclusively presenting female and non-binary artists in the Bay Area. Her curatorial practice is rooted in Romantic conceptualism and the poetics of memory, and the intersection of art and social discourse. (Photo Credit: Jenna Garrett)
Exhibition: Natural Fictions
Theresa Bembnister, Independent Curator (Cleveland, OH)
In the Interest of Time Gallery Tour
Theresa Bembnister is an independent curator and art writer based in Cleveland, OH. Previously, she served in curatorial roles at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in Little Rock, the Akron Art Museum, and the Beach Museum of Art in Manhattan, KS. (Photo Credit: Jason Masters)
Exhibition: In the Interest of Time
Joshua Berg, Artist (Covington, KY)
Joshua Berg is a photographer based in Covington, KY, at the confluence of the Ohio and Licking Rivers. Bound by the rhythms of two rivers, his work centers on the idea of home and the experience of living and growing up in the Midwest. His books and photographs explore the impossibility of untethering the body from place, and the endless dialogue of unraveling the actual. (Photo Credit: Brian Pfaff)
Exhibition: Natural Fictions
Kristen Gaylord, Herzfeld Curator of Photography and Media Arts at the Milwaukee Art Museum (Milwaukee, WI)
Widline Cadet: Seremoni Disparisyon (Ritual [Dis]Appearance) Curator Talk
Kristen Gaylord is the Herzfeld Curator of Photography and Media Arts at the Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM), where she recently organized Widline Cadet’s first solo exhibition at an American museum (2026) and Erin Shirreff: Permanent Drafts (2025), and serves as site curator for the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Arresting Beauty: Julia Margaret Cameron (2024). This year she opened Beneath the Surface: Mining and American Photography, a major survey of the relationship between photography and extractive industries in the United States from the 1840s until today, co-curated for the National Gallery of Art and currently on tour. Previously, Gaylord was a photography curator at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, where she worked with artists including Stephanie Syjuco and Camille Utterback and brought landmark surveys of An-My Lê and Christina Fernandez to Fort Worth. Additionally, she co-organized Moving Pictures: Karl Struss and the Rise of Hollywood (2024), whose catalogue won the Deutscher Fotobuchpreis. Gaylord also held multiple curatorial roles at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, where she contributed to exhibitions and publications including Stephen Shore (2017); Arbus Friedlander Winogrand: New Documents, 1967 (2017); and Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015. She holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. (Photo Credit: Ciara Elle Bryant)
Exhibition: Widline Cadet: Seremoni Disparisyon (Ritual [Dis]Appearance)
Elijah Howe, Photographer (Felton, CA)
In the Interest of Time Gallery Tour
Elijah Howe is a photographer who currently lives and works in Felton, CA. His work focuses on the fragmentary nature of photography and people’s relationships with one another, as well as their relationship with the land. Howe’s work explores quiet transitionary spaces in the landscape and the unsettling melancholy of the human condition.
Exhibition: In the Interest of Time
Daniel Immerwahr, Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University (Chicago, IL)
Keynote Lecture by Daniel Immerwahr
Daniel Immerwahr is Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University, where he teaches both United States and global history. He is a contributing writer at The New Yorker, and has written two award-winning books, Thinking Small (Harvard, 2015) and the New York Times bestselling How to Hide an Empire (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), which has been translated into nine languages. Immerwahr’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New Republic, The Guardian, the New York Review of Books, The Nation, Foreign Policy, and Slate. He lives in Rogers Park, Chicago.
Julie Renée Jones, Artist (Dayton, OH)
Panel:In the Interest of Time Gallery Tour
Julie Renée Jones is a photographic-based artist and educator currently living in Dayton, OH. Her work explores autobiographical narratives related to familial myth and matrescence, using the camera as a tool to reveal magic residing within the everyday and memory as a medium for approaching the unknown.
Her work has been exhibited extensively across the United States and internationally, and has been published in National Geographic and the British Journal of Photography. A selection of images from her series Hold Still is featured in Eye Mama: Poetic Truths of Home and Motherhood published by teNeues. She is a recipient of numerous awards and grants in support of her work, including two Ohio Arts Council’s Individual Excellence Awards.
Exhibition: In the Interest of Time
Heesoo Kwon, Artist (Los Angeles, CA)
Heesoo Kwon is a multimedia artist and educator based in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Having initiated the autobiographical feminist religion and speculative universe Leymusoom in 2017, she has exhibited internationally for nearly a decade. Kwon’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, KADIST, Huis Marseille, and the University of California Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art, and has been covered by Hyperallergic, Artforum, Rhizome, the Brooklyn Rail, and e-flux, among others. (Photo Credit: Breno Aragon)
Exhibition: Natural Fictions
Elizabeth Leitzell, Photographer and Short Filmmaker (Philadelphia, PA)
Conversation with Nathaniel M. Stein and Elizabeth Leitzell
Elizabeth Leitzell is a photographer, short-film maker, and editor based in the Greater Philadelphia Area. On most days, you’ll find her working on collaborations with visual artists, musicians, authors, start-ups, and non-profit institutions in the arts, social services, and sciences. She believes in using the power of image-based narratives for social change. Through a free exploration of color, composition, listening, and emotion, Leitzell hopes her work can support building new systems of cooperation, reconciliation, and reorganization. (Photo Credit: Kyle Struve)
Phillip Maisel, Artist (San Francisco, CA)
Phillip Maisel utilizes site-informed materials to create sculpture, collage, video, and photographic objects. His work often subverts expectations of photographic space, destabilizing the viewer’s visual literacy. He received his M.F.A. from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and his B.S. in Psychology from McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Maisel has presented solo exhibitions at the Chiquita Room, Barcelona, Spain; Gregory Lind Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Nazarian / Curcio (formerly Shulamit Nazarian), Los Angeles, CA; and DOCUMENT, Chicago, IL. He has exhibited at The William Benton Museum of Art at the University of Connecticut; the University of New Mexico, Taos; and the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Boston, MA. His book, Two Concrete Things, received the ArtsLibris-Fundació Banc Sabadell Award in 2021. His work is included in the KADIST collection, as well as the High Museum, Atlanta, GA.
Exhibition: Natural Fictions
Robyn Moore, Photomedia-based Artist (Morehead, KY)
In the Interest of Time Gallery Tour
Robyn Moore is a photomedia-based artist living and working in eastern Kentucky. Her work explores how alternative and experimental photographic processes can reveal the unseen worlds around us, while her research investigates deep time, biosemiotics, geology, paleontology, phenomenology, and the ways in which images can help us facilitate understanding of and solidarity with other forms of life.
Moore’s work has been exhibited widely, including at the Jubilee Fifth International Print Biennale, Yerevan, Armenia; the South Australian Museum, Adelaine, Australia; Gold Street Studios Gallery, Victoria, Australia; the Centre for Print Research, Bristol, England; Houston Center for Photography, Soho Photo Gallery, New York, NY; The Halide Project, Philadelphia, PA; The Image Flow Photography Center, San Anselmo, CA; and Manhattan Graphics Center, New York, NY. Recent honors include selection as the 2024 South Arts Southern Prize and State Fellowship recipient for Kentucky, the 2025 Uncommon Art Residency Award at the Teton Art Lab in Jackson, WY, and a Great Meadows Foundation Artist Professional Development Grant. Moore’s work won the professional series alternative processes category at the 23rd Julia Margaret Cameron Awards for Women Photographers.
Moore holds a Ph.D. in Visual Arts from the University of Sydney and an M.F.A. in Photography and Experimental Film from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. She is currently an Associate Professor of Photography at Morehead State University in Morehead, KY.
Exhibition: In the Interest of Time
Osamu James Nakagawa, Ruth N. Halls Distinguished Professor at Indiana University (Bloomington, IN)
In the Interest of Time Gallery Tour
Osamu James Nakagawa was born in New York City, raised in Tokyo, and returned to the United States at age fifteen, when he moved to Houston, TX. His artistic practice moves fluidly between the personal and political, shaped by his transnational experience in both Japan and the United States. Nakagawa received his M.F.A. from the University of Houston in 1993 and is currently the Ruth N. Halls Distinguished Professor of Art at Indiana University Bloomington. Nakagawa is the recipient of numerous honors, including the 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is held in major public collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY; the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and others. He is represented by PGI, Tokyo. (Photo Credit: Elaine Miller)
Exhibition: In the Interest of Time
Trevor Paglen, Artist (New York, NY and San Francisco, CA)
Paglen has had solo exhibitions at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington D.C.; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy; the Barbican Centre, London, UK; Vienna Secession, Austria; and Protocinema Istanbul, Turkey; and participated in group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, London, England; and numerous other venues.
Paglen has launched an artwork into distant orbit around Earth in collaboration with Creative Time and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), contributed research and cinematography to the Academy Award-winning film Citizenfour (2014), and created a radioactive public sculpture for the exclusion zone in Fukushima, Japan.
Paglen is the author of several books and many articles on subjects including experimental geography, artificial intelligence, state secrecy, military symbology, photography, and visuality. Paglen’s work has been profiled in the New York Times, The New Yorker,The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Financial Times, Artforum, and Aperture. In 2014, he received the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award and, in 2016, he won the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. Paglen was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2017.
In March 2026, Paglen was named the winner of the LG Guggenheim Award. Paglen’s sixth book, How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI, was released by Verso Books in the same year.
Paglen holds a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, an M.F.A. from the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley. (Photo Credit: Michael Avedon)
Exhibition: Trevor Paglen: the most merciful thing in the world
Jordanne Renner, Multidisciplinary Artist (Columbus, OH and Piermont, NY)
In the Interest of Time Gallery Tour
Jordanne Renner is a multidisciplinary portrait artist that primarily works within large format film photography, figurative sculpture, mixed media painting, public art, and installation. The notion of self, culture of place, the body and landscape, what we eat, and the psychology of memory are recurring topics of investigation in her work, as well as the idea of the photograph as an object. Split between the Midwest and the East Coast, Renner divides her time between studio practice, community endeavors, and teaching. She is a member of the National League of American Pen Women and the Society for Photographic Education, and is the Creative Wild of Gallery Palindroma & the ArtLab located in the Lower Hudson Valley.
Exhibition: In the Interest of Time
Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Artist and Professor (Los Angeles)
Conversation with Paul Mpagi Sepuya and Carmen Winant
Paul Mpagi Sepuya is a Los Angeles-based artist working in photography. He is known for his New York portrait series from the early 2000s, later moving into studio-based projects that question and complicate questions of authorship, the visualization of race and sexuality, and the structures of the photographic medium. Sepuya’s work has been acquired by the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Tate Modern, London, England; the Victoria and Albert Museum, United Kingdom; and others. Solo museum exhibitions include Fotomuseum Amsterdam, PHOXXI at Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Germany; and surveys at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, MO, and Nottingham Contemporary, United Kingdom. Focus. Desire., a survey of work from 2005–2025 was presented in 2026 at Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, and the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, Germany. His work has been covered and published in Artforum, Aperture, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Art Review, Frieze, and Art in America. Sepuya is a Professor in Visual Arts and M.F.A. Program Director at the University of California San Diego, where he has taught since 2019.
Exhibition: Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Compressed Tenses
Nathaniel M. Stein, Curator of Photography at the Cincinnati Art Museum (Cincinnati, OH)
Nancy Rexroth: Secrets of My Power Reception and Lecture
Conversation with Nathaniel M. Stein and Elizabeth Leitzell
Nathaniel M. Stein, Ph.D., is Curator of Photography at the Cincinnati Art Museum (CAM). Stein earned degrees in art history from Wesleyan University and Brown University, where his doctoral research focused on the history of photography in India. He has organized exhibitions of historical and contemporary photography—including presentations in Cincinnati of the works of David Hartt and John Edmonds, Sohrab Hura, Gillian Wearing, the Kamoinge Workshop, and Hank Willis Thomas—and led the formation of the CAM’s Nancy Rexroth Collection. Recent publications include The Natural World (2022), The Levee: A Photographer in the American South (2020), and Interference: Andre Bradley and Paul Anthony Smith (2017), as well as contributions to Beyond Bollywood: 2000 Years of Dance in the Arts of South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Himalayan Region (2022). Prior to arriving in Cincinnati, Stein held curatorial positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. Locally, he serves on the ArtsWave Pride Steering Committee. (Photo Credit: Tim Tiebout)
Exhibition: Nancy Rexroth: Secrets of My Power
Joseph Vitone, Photographer (Austin, TX)
In the Interest of Time Gallery Tour
Joe Vitone is a documentary fine art photographer and educator. His work consists of large format portraiture and landscape in the United States, as well as panoramic and other views examining cultures abroad. He is Professor of Photocommunications at St. Edward’s University in Austin, TX, where he teaches both traditional and digital photography along with electronic media. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Photography and was a Fulbright scholar in Costa Rica, as well as a Fulbright Specialist in the Apulia region of southern Italy. In Italy, Vitone’s work centered around small-scale, family-based agriculture and the evidence of place and culture in the urban area. In addition to presentations given in the United States, he has lectured on his photography in Australia, China, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam. His work has been exhibited at a number of venues including solo exhibitions at the Hungarian Museum of Photography, Kecskemét, Hungary; the Akron Art Museum, OH; and the Instituto Cultural Peruano Norteamericano, Lima, Peru. His work is held in a number of collections including the Cleveland Museum of Art, OH; the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, Tucson; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, Hungary; and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C. (Photo credit: Dylan Vitone)
Exhibition: In the Interest of Time
Lynn Whitney, Associate Professor Emeritus (Waterville, OH)
In the Interest of Time Gallery Tour
Lynn Whitney is a large format black-and-white film photographer working in the documentary tradition. Her photographs illuminate timeless questions central to the human search for meaning and purpose, grounded by the landscape and animals. Through diverse, but universally connected subject matter including soldiers in the military, sisters in the convent, family members, farmers, and birders, Whitney’s work addresses the mysterious air we share in community with one another.
Whitney earned her B.A. in American Culture Studies from Boston University, her B.F.A. in Photography from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and her M.F.A. from Yale School of Art. Her monograph, Lake Erie (2023) was published by Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany, and a monograph featuring her convent photographs, published by Dust Collective, will be available early 2027.
Whitney has received commissions from the Toledo Museum of Art and The George Gund Foundation in Cleveland, and an Individual Artist Grant from the Ohio Arts Council. Her work is in the collections of the Toledo Museum of Art, OH; The George Gund Foundation, Cleveland, OH; the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago Midwest Photographers Project, IL; the Cleveland Clinic, OH; Ohio Humanities; Southeast Center for Photographic Studies, Daytona Beach, FL; and Yale University, New Haven, CT.
Whitney is Associate Professor Emeritus of Photography at Bowling Green State University, where she served as Photography area head in the School of Art for over thirty years. She now lives in Northwest Ohio. (Photo Credit: Kevin Vereecke)
Exhibition: In the Interest of Time
Carmen Winant, Artist and Roy Lichtenstein Chair of Studio Art at the Ohio State University (Columbus, OH)
Conversation with Paul Mpagi Sepuya and Carmen Winant
Carmen Winant is an artist and the Roy Lichtenstein Chair of Studio Art at the Ohio State University. Her work utilizes archival and authored photographs to examine feminist care networks, with particular emphasis on intergenerational, multiracial, and sometimes transnational coalition building. Winant’s recent projects have been shown at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej, Warsaw, Poland; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN; SculptureCenter, Queens NY; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; the Cleveland Museum of Art, OH; and el Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, Mexico. Winant’s artist’s books include My Birth (2018), Notes on Fundamental Joy (2019), Instructional Photography: Learning How To Live Now (2021), Arrangements (2022), A Brand New End: Survival and Its Pictures (2022), and The Last Safe Abortion (2024). Winant is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in photography, a 2020 Foundation of Contemporary Arts Artist Honoree, and a 2021 American Academy of Arts and Letters award recipient. She is also a community organizer, prison educator, and mother. (Photo Credit: Jordan Weitzman)
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