Colin Blakely
Director, School of Art and Associate Vice President for Strategic Initiatives, Arizona Arts
Colin Blakely is the Director of the School of Art at the University of Arizona. Prior to joining the University of Arizona in July 2015, he was Department head and Full Professor of Photography at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, MI, where he was on the faculty for 14 years. As Director, Colin leads a school of 34 faculty and 11 staff in a school with approximately 550 majors and programs in Art History, Studio Art and Art and Visual Culture Education. He currently serves on the Board of Directors for the National Council of Arts Administrators (as Treasurer) and until recently the College Art Association (as Secretary and Acting Treasurer).
Colin’s work has been shown at Fotofest Houston, the Society for Contemporary Photography, the Pingyao International Photography Festival, the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Photographic Center Northwest and the Jen Bekman Gallery. Colin was a runner-up for the 2009 Aperture Portfolio Prize and a Winter 2007 Hot Shot. Publications include Pause to Begin, Photography Quarterly, and The Humble Collectors’ Guide to Emerging Art Photography. He received his B.A. from Williams College with a double major in Math and Studio Art, and his M.F.A. in Photography from the University of New Mexico.
María Beatriz H. Carrión
The Graduate Center, CUNY & Amon Carter Museum of American Art
María Beatriz H. Carrión is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she specializes in modern and contemporary art of the Americas, with a focus on Indigenous art and photographic history. Currently, she serves as Assistant Curator of Photographs at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. Carrión has previously held positions at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Baruch College, the Rijksmuseum, and the Morgan Library and Museum. Her research has been supported by the Terra and Phelps de Cisneros foundations, the Huntington Library and Museum, and the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, among others.
Boyoung Chang
University of Alberta
Boyoung Chang teaches modern and contemporary Korea in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Alberta. Chang’s research focuses on photography and art created in and about modern and contemporary Korea. She has published articles about the visuality of Korea, including “When Photographs Refuse to Speak: Oh Heinkuhn’s Gwangju Story” in Photographies (2022) and “De/Bordering Korea: North Korea Represented in Liminal Space” in Acta Koreana (2023).
Elena Tajima Creef
Wellesley College
Elena Tajima Creef is a professor at Wellesley College where she teaches Techno Orientalism, and Asian American film and photography. Her recent book is Seeing Japanese/American and Ainu Women in Photographic Archives (University of Illinois Press, 2022). She is also finishing Notes of Fragmented Daughter—a visual memoir about growing up in the 1960s and 1970s in Oklahoma, Southern California, and Japan—as well as a multimedia project about her experience as an “accidental” historical reenactor at the Battle of Little Bighorn designed to coincide with the 150th anniversary of this famous event in 2026.
Qiang Hu
University of California, San Diego
Qiang Hu is a PhD student in Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the University of California, San Diego. Her research examines postwar Asian American, Asian diasporic, and multiracial art, with a particular focus on how identities are constructed and performed. She holds a BA in Art History and Philosophy from Brandeis University and an MA in History of Art and Archaeology from the Institute of Fine Arts. Her master’s thesis explored the work of Afro-Chinese Jamaican artist Albert Chong, analyzing how vernacular objects and photography shape identity within overlooked historical narratives.
Hamin Kim
Boston University
Hamin Kim (she/her) is a first year Ph.D. student at Boston University whose research centers on modernization and globalization in Korean art, with particular emphasis on Korea’s cultural exchange with Japan and the United States and the history of performance in Korea.
She received her master’s degree in 20th-century art history from the University of Glasgow, United Kingdom, and her bachelor’s degree with a double major in clothing and textiles and art history from Ewha Womans University, South Korea. She previously held positions at the Art Institute of Chicago, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), and the Whanki Museum.
Jeehey Kim
University of Arizona
Jeehey Kim is an assistant professor in the art history program at the School of Art, University of Arizona. She earned a PhD in Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She has been publishing on Korean photography, including her first book Photography and Korea. She has been writing on vernacular photographic practices and on documentary films and visual culture in relation to the Cold War and gender politics in East Asia. At the University of Arizona, she launched a series of symposia on Asian photography with the Center for Creative Photography in the Spring of 2022. She is currently working on her second book project on funerary use of portrait photography in East Asia.
Brian Van Lau
Brian Van Lau (b.1996, Honolulu, HI) is a self-taught Vietnamese-American photographer based between Honolulu, HI and Los Angeles, CA. His work is about searching for fictitious evidence and using the tool of photography to explore and materialize interpersonal and generational relationships. His first monograph, We’re just Here For the Bad Guys, is to be published and produced by the Light Work organization, and announced later this year. He is a 2023 Aperture Portfolio Prize Runner-up, a recipient of the 2024 Google x Aperture Creator Labs Grant, a winner of the 2023 Innovate Grant, a selected participant in the New York Times Portfolio Review, and the founder of Arcanite Pictures, an online platform and publisher dedicated to highlighting emerging artists. His work most recently his work was exhibited at the Hō‘ikeākea Gallery in Honolulu, HI as part of Float On, curated by Phil Jung, and lectured at the Northwind Art School in Port Townsend, WA. He has been commissioned and feature on The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Vogue, and many more.
Pok Chi Lau
Pok Chi Lau is a Hong Kong-born (1950) photographer and Professor Emeritus of PhotoMedia at the University of Kansas. His work on global migration and the Chinese diaspora has been widely exhibited and published. His research spans North America, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, China , Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand and currently Vietnam, documenting the resilience and adaptation of Cantonese migrant communities.
Mia Liu
Johns Hopkins University
Mia Yinxing Liu is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Art at Johns Hopkins University. She received her PhD in Art History from the University of Chicago, and has widely published on Chinese modern art, cinema, and histories of photography in East Asia. Her research interests also include optical devices, double portraits, phantasmagoria, and other spectacles of dreams and shadows in the history of Chinese art and visual culture. Her first book, The Literati Lens: Wenren Landscape in Chinese Cinema (1950-1979) (University of Hawai’i Press, 2019), discusses how landscapes in Chinese feature cinema in the Maoist era were fields of contesting visions. She has also written extensively on the history of Chinese photography, for example, “The Allegorical Landscape: Lang Jingshan’s Photography in Context” (Archives of Asian Arts, 2015), and “The Surrealist and Documentary in Chang Chao-Tang’s Photography” (Art in Translation, 2018). Her research has been supported as a Postdoctorate Fellow at Yale University, Taiwan Fellow, and as a residential scholar at the Getty Research Institute.
Annu Palakunnathu Matthew
University of Rhode Island
ANNU PALAKUNNATHU MATTHEW’s photo-based work draws on old photographs to re-examine historical narratives. Matthew’s exhibitions include the RISD Museum, Royal Ontario Museum, MFA Boston, MFA Houston, Victoria & Albert Museum, 2018 Kochi-Muziris Biennale, 2018 Fotofest Biennial, and the Smithsonian. Grants include a John Gutmann, MacColl Johnson and two Fulbright Fellowships.Her monograph, “The Answers Take Time,” was published by Minor Matters Books and sepiaEYE. Annu Palakunnathu Matthew is a Professor of Art at the University of Rhode Island. She was also the Director of the Center for the Humanities. Matthew is represented by sepiaEYE, NYC.
Osamu James Nakagawa, Keynote Speaker
Indiana University
Osamu James Nakagawa was born in New York City in 1962 and raised in Tokyo. He returned to the United States, moving to Houston, Texas, at the age of 15. He received a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Houston in 1993. Currently, Nakagawa is the Ruth N. Halls Distinguished Professor of Photography at Indiana University. He lives and works in Bloomington, Indiana.
Nakagawa is a recipient of the 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2010 Higashikawa New Photographer of the Year, and 2015 Sagamihara Photographer of the Year in Japan. Nakagawa’s work has been exhibited internationally, solo exhibitions include Witness Trees, PGI, Tokyo (2023); Eclipse PGI, Tokyo(2019); OKINAWA TRILOGY: Osamu James Nakagawa, Kyoto University of the Arts(2013); Banta: Stained Memory, Sakima Art Museum Okinawa, Japan(2010); Course: Banta, SEPIA International Inc., New York, NY, and others.
Selected group shows include – Triennial of Photography Hamburg 2022: Currency: Photography Beyond Capture, Halle fur Aktuelle de Kunst-Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; Photography to End All Photography, Brandts Museum, Denmark (2018); A Shared Elegy: Emmet Gowin, Elijah Gowin, Takayuki Ogawa, James Nakagawa, Grunwald Gallery of Art, Indiana University (2017); The Photograph: What You See & What You Don’t #02, Tokyo University of Arts(2015); Infinite Pulse: Photography in Time, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2016); After Photoshop: Manipulated Photography in the Digital Age, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2012); War/Photography: Photographs of Armed Conflict and its Aftermath, Museum of Fine Arts Houston (2012); Traces and Omens, 2005 Noorderlicht Photofestival, Netherlands, Contemporary American Photography, 7 International Fototage 2005, Germany; Cuenca, Ecuador Bienal ’98: Borderline Figuration; Medialogue-Photography in Contemporary Japanese Art ’98, Tokyo Photographic Arts Museum.
His work is included in numerous public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; George Eastman Museum; Tokyo Photographic Arts Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Sakima Art Museum, Okinawa; The Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Indianapolis Museum of Arts, Grand Rapid Museum of Art and others. Nakagawa’s monograph GAMA Caves is available from Akaaka Art Publisher in Tokyo, Japan.
Sandra Park
University of Arizona
Thy Phu
University of Toronto
Thy Phu is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Toronto. She is the author of two books and co-editor of three volumes, including, most recently, Warring Visions: Photography and Vietnam and Cold War Camera. She is also co-editor of the journal of Trans Asia Photography.
Susan Sponsler-Carstarphen
Susan Sponsler-Carstarphen was born in Seoul, South Korea. She was adopted when she was an infant and grew up on a farm in Iowa. She earned a BA in Advertising Design at Iowa State University, and an MFA in photography at Texas Woman’s University. Her work explores issues related to identity and being an Asian American international adoptee and consists of photo-based artworks which include ceramics, cyanotype images on fabric, encaustic paintings, installation, mixed media images and quilts. Her work has been shown in Seoul, South Korea; Panama City, Panama; Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, and Texas. Her work is included in numerous publications, most notably in the book Photography and Korea by Jeehey Kim and in “Convergent Conversations” by Margo Machida in Blackwell’s Journal: A companion to Asian art and architecture. She works in her studio at the Goldmark Cultural Center in Dallas.
David Taylor
University of Arizona
Stephanie Tung
Peabody Essex Museum
Stephanie H. Tung is the Byrne Family Curator of Photography at the Peabody Essex Museum. Tung served as co-curator or assistant curator for As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic; the award-winning Power and Perspective: Early Photography in China; and the forthcoming Jung Yeondoo: Building Dreams. Most recently, she served as guest-editor for Aperture’s summer 2023 issue, “Being and Becoming: Asian in America.” She has published widely on photography and contemporary art from Asia. Tung holds a B.A. in Literature and History of Art and Architecture from Harvard University and an M.A. in Art and Archeology from Princeton University.
Yechen Zhao
Art Institute of Chicago
Yechen Zhao is the assistant curator of Photography and Media at the Art Institute of Chicago. He specializes in twentieth-century American photography and East Asian photography during the Cold War and its aftermath. He has served as a visiting critic for the Yale School of Art, and his writing has appeared in History of Photography and Aperture. Forthcoming publications include essays on Soichi Sunami, Reagan Louie, Liu Zheng, and Gwon Doyeon. He received his PhD in art history from Stanford University.
