ICP faculty member and artist Marina Berio released her artist book Ten Photography Lessons for a Dead President recently. She also participated in the group exhibitions Awai and Mother at Seizan Gallery in the Chelsea arts district and Speaking in Pairs at Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery at Hunter College.
Marina’s artist book, Ten Photography Lessons for a Dead President, is an epistolary reckoning with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 and Berio’s family stories of incarceration. She recently presented it at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington DC, across the street from the White House. The evening opened with a reading and presentation, followed by a conversation with Shirley Ann Higuchi, JD, of Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation. Together they explored family photography, visual history, and the role of creativity in incarceree resilience, situating the project within an urgent context of state power, surveillance, and exclusion.
Ten Photography Lessons unfolds through a series of meditations on the photographic record and its efficacy or failure at relating the truth of the incarceration of over 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry during World War II. Self-published in an edition of 250, Ten Photography Lessons draws a resonant line from FDR’s wartime policies to contemporary exercise of executive power, illuminating how the past continues to reverberate in the present.
The group exhibition, Speaking in Pairs, on view Spring 2026 in a gallery endowed by the Leubsdorf family, looks at the aesthetic, material, social, and political layers that portraits offer—revealing how the people they portray, their makers and viewers, and the changing world they exist in connect and conflict in shifting cycles over time.
More than eighty contributors—artists, historians, lawyers, doctors, writers, curators, and more—come together for this exhibition, which presents works in a continually evolving installation and uses books, posters, and ephemera to visually illuminate the connections between vernacular photography and art, nobody and somebody, the personal and public. An array of viewpoints blurs the lines between artists, curators, and other subjects, and between non-fiction and fiction.
Marina Berio is a visual artist from New York and Chair Emerita of the Creative Practices Program who works with drawings and photography to convey aspects of visual experience that are intimate and visceral. She has printed family pictures with her own blood and rendered photographic negatives as large-scale charcoal drawings. A more recent project, for which she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, was shot on the walls of her studio and expresses the interrelationship between the nested realities of mental space, creative process, the internal topography of the body, and the surfaces of the studio itself. Berio’s artist’s book about her family and the pictorial record of the Japanese American incarceration during World War II, Ten Photography Lessons for a Dead President, has been presented at RISE in the Rockaways, New York, and at the book fairs of the International Center of Photography and Penumbra Foundation in New York City.
Berio teaches at the International Center of Photography in New York, and is a founding member of PAIN, the activist group founded by Nan Goldin to hold the Sackler family accountable for their role in creating the opioid crisis.