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Against the backdrop of ongoing chaos, women are documenting wars, conflicts, crises, and revolutions, in both private realms and public spaces. Their work ranges from fine art photography—made as a personal response to forced silence, political oppression, and/or the inability to act—to photojournalism, documenting political and social upheaval. Featuring contemporary imagemakers in conversation, the Women Picturing Revolution panel will examine not only these photographs, but also the conditions under which women make such compelling images. In dialogue with photographers who engage these issues, the panel will aim to reclaim and retell a history that is both radical and necessary.

Panelists

• Grace Aneiza Ali (moderator)
• Donna De Cesare
• Tanya Habjouqa
• Muriel Hasbun

This panel was co-organized by ICP faculty member Lesly Deschler Canossi and curator Zoraida Lopez-Diago. Canossi is a photographer, photo educator, and owner of Fiber Ink Studio, a pigment print and scanning studio in Beacon, New York. Her first book, Domestic Negotiations, was published in 2014. Lopez recently co-curated Women as Witness, an exhibition at TI Art Studios (Brooklyn, New York) about how women photograph community upheaval, and was the assistant curator of Picturing Black Girlhood, a photography exhibition at Columbia University/Raw Space presented in conjunction with Columbia University’s Black Girl Movement Conference. Her photographs documenting women in Colombia’s drug wars have been published in Of Note magazine, the World Policy Journal, and El Tiempo. A one-day seminar taught by Canossi and Lopez will take place on Saturday, November 5.

Bios

Grace Aneiza Ali, moderator, is a faculty member in the Department of Art and Public Policy, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, and the editorial director of Of Note, an award-winning online magazine on art and activism. Her essays on contemporary art and photography have been published in the journals Nueva Luz and Small Axe, among others. She is the curator of the 2016 exhibition Un|Fixed Homeland at the Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, New Jersey on contemporary photography of her native Guyana. Highlights of her curatorial work include the following: Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts Curatorial Fellow, guest curator of the 2014 Addis Foto Fest, guest curator of the fall 2013 Nueva Luz photographic journal, and host of the Visually Speaking photojournalism series at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Ali is a World Economic Forum “Global Shaper” and Fulbright Scholar. She holds a master of arts in Africana studies from New York University and a bachelor of arts in English literature from the University of Maryland, College Park. See graceali.com and ofnotemagazine.org.

Donna De Cesare is an author, educator, documentary photographer, and recipient of numerous documentary photography awards and grants. Highlights include the Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, the Mother Jones award for Social Documentary Photography, a Fulbright Fellowship, and several Open Society Foundations grants for independent photographic projects. Her book Unsettled Desasosiego: Children in a World of Gangs was published in 2013, and received the Maria Moors Cabot Prize for Journalism, one of international journalism’s highest honors. In 2016, she was named among Time magazine’s women trailblazers in photography. De Cesare teaches photography in underserved communities, and to college students and professional photographers in the US and Latin America. She is a master teacher for the Garcia Márquez New Journalism Project in Cartagena de las Indias, Colombia, and is a tenured associate professor at the School of Journalism at the University of Texas, Austin.

Tanya Habjouqa is an award-winning photographer, journalist, and educator. Her practice links social documentary, collaborative portraiture, and participant observation. Her principal interests include gender, representations of otherness, dispossession, and human rights, with a particular concern for ever-shifting sociopolitical dynamics in the Middle East. Trained in journalism and anthropology, with a master of arts in Global Media and emphasis on Middle East politics from SOAS University of London, Habjouqa produces in-depth narratives that offer nuanced alternatives to mainstream media depictions of her subjects. Her work often reflects a desire to trace common humanity. Based in East Jerusalem, Habjouqa is half-Texan, half-Jordanian, with Circassian ancestry, possessing a diverse background rich in narrative, folklore, black humor, and hospitality.

Habjouqa’s project Occupied Pleasures received support from the Magnum Foundation, and achieved a World Press Photo award in 2014. Culminating in a namesake book by FotoEvidence, it was heralded by Time magazine and the Smithsonian as one of the best photobooks of 2015. Habjouqa’s work has been exhibited worldwide and is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Institut du Monde Arabe, and the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. She is a founding member of Rawiya, the first all-female photography collective from the Middle East.

She is a mentor for the groundbreaking educational initiative Arab Documentary Photography Program, organized by the Magnum Foundation, the Prince Claus Fund, and AFAC, and a member of Noor. Habjouqa is represented by East Wing, an international platform for photography founded in Doha, Qatar.

Muriel Hasbun is an artist and educator who focuses on issues of cultural identity and memory, as well as on promoting cultural exchange. Through an intergenerational, transnational, and transcultural lens, Hasbun constructs contemporary narratives and establishes a space for dialogue, where individual and collective memory spark new questions about identity and place. Currently an artist in residence at the Centro Cultural de España in El Salvador, she is the recipient of numerous distinctions, including: a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, the Howard Chapnick Grant of the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund, a Museums Connect grant, a Fulbright Scholar grant, and Individual Artist Awards in Photography and Media from the Maryland State Arts Council and the DC Commission on the Arts. Her photographic works are exhibited internationally and held in private and public collections, such as: the Art Museum of the Americas, District of Columbia Art Bank, En Foco, Lehigh University, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the University of Texas at Austin, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

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