2018 Faculty & Fellows

Stephanie Barber Stephanie Barber (Faculty) is an American writer and artist. She has created a poetic, conceptual and philosophical body of work in a variety of media. Her videos are concerned with the content, musicality and experiential qualities of language and her language is concerned with the emotional impact of moments and ideas. Each ferry viewers through philosophical inquiry with the unexpected oars of empathy, play, story and humor. Barber’s films and videos have screened nationally and internationally in solo and group shows at MOMA, NY; The Tate Modern, London; The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; The Paris Cinematheque; The Walker Art Center, MN; MOCA Los Angeles, The Wexner Center for Art, OH, among other galleries, museums and festivals. Her videos are distributed by Video Data Bank and her films can be found at Canyon Cinema and Fandor.com. Her books Night Moves and these here separated… were published by Publishing Genius Press in 2013 and 2010 respectively. Her collection of very short stories All The People was published by Ink Press Productions in 2015. Barber is currently a resident artist at The Mt. Royal MFA for Interdisciplinary Art at MICA in Baltimore, MD
Nydia Blas
Nydia Blas (Faculty) is a visual artist living in Ithaca, New York with her two children. She holds a B.S. from Ithaca College and received her M.F.A. from Syracuse University in the School of Visual and Performing Arts. She currently serves as the Acting Executive Director of Southside Community Center, Inc. Blas delicately weaves stories concerning circumstance, value, and power and uses her work to create a physical and allegorical space presented through a Black feminine lens. She is drawn to matters of sexuality and intimacy and calls upon her lived experience as a girl, woman, and mother. The result is an environment that is dependent upon the belief that in order to maintain resiliency, a magical outlook is necessary.
Tisa Bryant
Tisa Bryant (Faculty) is the author of Unexplained Presence, a collection of fiction-essays on black presences in film, literature and visual arts, and co-editor of the cross-referenced literary journal, The Encyclopedia Project, which released its final book, Encyclopedia Vol. 3 L-Z, in Fall 2017.   She was a commissioned writer/archival researcher for Radio Imagination, a year-long Los Angeles celebration of science fiction writer Octavia Butler, sponsored by Los Angeles-based arts organization, Clockshop, in collaboration with the Huntington Library in Pasadena, where Butler’s papers are held.  In addition to recent performances and talks with film, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Body Forms: Queer Writing and the Essay, Flesh, Lana Turner, Letters to the Future: Black WOMEN/ Radical WRITING, and in exhibition catalogs for Cauleen Smith, Sam Durant, Wura-Natasha Ogunji and MADE IN L.A.: 2018.  She is working on The Curator, a novel of Black female subjectivity and imagined cinema, and on Residual, writings on grief, longing, desire and archival research, forthcoming from Nightboat Books.  She is Director of the Creative Writing Program at CalArts, where she teaches fiction, nonfiction, and experimental forms.  She lives in Los Angeles.
Melissa Catanese and Ed Panar
Melissa Catanese & Ed Panar (Faculty)
Melissa Catanese lives in Pittsburgh and is founder of Spaces Corners, an artist-run photobook shop and project space. She most recently exhibited in Secondhand at Pier 24 Photography in San Francisco and in The Photographer’s Playspace at the Aperture Foundation in New York. She has been editing from a vast collection of over 20,000 photographs belonging to collector Peter J. Cohen for some years, and in 2012 she authored the celebrated photobook Dive Dark Dream Slow (The Ice Plant, 2012).

Ed Panar is a photographer and bookmaker currently residing in the forested hills and hollows of Pittsburgh. He has published numerous photobooks including: Nothing Changes if Nothing Changes (Spaces Corners & The Ice Plant, 2013), Salad Days (Gottlund Verlag, 2011), Animals That Saw Me (The Ice Plant, 2011), Same Difference (Gottlund Verlag, 2010), and Golden Palms (J&L Books, 2007). His photographs and books have been exhibited internationally at venues including: The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, Nofound Photofair, Paris, The New York Photography Festival and the Cleveland Museum of Art.

In 2014, Catanese and Panar were artists-in-residence at the Carnegie Museum of Art where they programmed The Sandbox: At Play With The Photobook. Together in 2016, they served as The Georgette and Richard Koopman Distinguished Chair in the Visual Arts at the Hartford Art School.
Bruno Ceschel
Bruno Ceschel (Faculty) is a writer, curator and lecturer at the University of the Arts London. He is the founder of Self Publish, Be Happy (SPBH), an organization that supports and promotes the work of emerging photographers. SPBH has organised events at a number of institutions around the world, including The Photographer’s Gallery, ICA London, The Serpentine Galleries, C/O Berlin, Aperture Foundation and Kunsthal Charlottenborg amongst others. Most recently, SPBH has published books by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Cristina De Middel, Mariah Robertson and Lorenzo Vitturi.

Ceschel writes regularly for a number of publications including FOAM, The British Journal of Photography and Aperture Magazine and has guest-edited issues of Photography and Culture, Ojo de Pez and The PhotoBook Review.
Tonya Foster
Tonya M. Foster (Faculty) was raised in New Orleans, LA. She is the author of the bilingual chapbook La Grammaire des Os and the poetry collection A Swarm of Bees in High Court, which critic Stephen Burt describes as “the long-delayed American apotheosis of haiku form.” In a review, poet Patricia Spears Jones notes that “Foster’ s imaginative work glories in language’s ambiguities, discords, emotions, and logic—she allows that imaginative thrall to explore race and gender and political dysfunction.” A coeditor of Third Mind: Creative Writing through Visual Art, Foster’s work has been published in Best American Experimental Writing (2016), boundary2, Litscapes: Collected US Writings 2015, CallalooMiPoesiasWestern Humanities Review, the Hat, and elsewhere. Foster has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Graduate Center, CUNY, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Macdowell Colony, the Pan African literary Festival, and elsewhere. She is an Assistant Professor of Writing & Literature, and of Graduate Writing at California College of the Arts.
John Keene
John Keene (Fellow) is the author of the acclaimed short fiction collection Counternarratives (New Directions, 2015), the novel Annotations (New Directions, 1995); and the poetry collection Seismosis (1913 Press, 2006), an art-text collaboration with artist Christopher Stackhouse. His translation of Brazilian writer Hilda Hilst’s novel Letters from a Seducer (Nightboat Books) appeared in 2014. An artist as well, he has exhibited his work in New York and Berlin, and teaches at Rutgers University-Newark
Emma Kemp
Emma Kemp (Fellow) is a British-born writer based in Los Angeles. A graduate of the MFA Writing Program at California Institute of the Arts, her essays and articles have appeared in Atlas Obscura, Ohio Edit, and more. Emma’s is the recipient of the Utah Humanities’ 2016-17 Delmont R. Oswald Fellowship for her long-term investigation of a spiritualist community in rural Utah. She is co-founder of publishing platform Which Witch L.A. and one half of artist collaborative Earl Gravy. Recent work includes Blue Pool / Cecelia (iTi Press, 2017) and a forthcoming biographical project due Fall 2018 (Harton Miffin Harcourt). She is currently an instructor at Otis College of Art and Design.
Jason Livingston
Jason Livingston (Fellow) is a film and video maker currently based in Iowa City, IA, working with the Department of Cinematic Arts at the University of Iowa. A teacher, writer, and occasional programmer, he has worked with many non-profits, including Cornell Cinema, the Experimental TV Center, the Standby Program and others.  He is currently on the Board of Trustees with the Flaherty Seminar.  His award-winning work has screened widely, including Rotterdam, Anthology Film Archives, the Austrian Museum, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and more.  Under Foot & Overstory is distributed by the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, and Lake Affect is available through Electronic Arts Intermix as part of the Experimental Television Center DVD boxed set.
Elana Schlenker
Elana Schlenker (Faculty) is an art director and graphic designer. Through her independent studio practice she creates visual identities, books and publications, interactive projects, and environmental graphics. Elana has received the Art Directors Club Young Gun award (2015) and been named to Print magazine’s annual New Visual Artist list (2013), a distinction recognizing the top twenty creative talents under age thirty. She was also selected for the Center for Architecture’s Graphic Design Shortlist (2015). Prior to the establishment of her studio practice, Elana worked as an art director at Condé Nast and senior designer at Princeton Architectural Press. Elana publishes Gratuitous Type, an occasional pamphlet of typographic smut, and is the creator of Less Than 100, a traveling pop up shop for gender wage parity. Elana serves on the Board of Directors of the Silver Eye Center for Photography.
Luke Stettner
Luke Stettner (Faculty). “On May 1st, 1938, my grandfather Harry Kassowitz took a single photograph of Manhattan island from the fore of a steamship less than a kilometer from the gateway of Ellis Island. He took this photograph with a Leica III.  In a bazaar in Prague some sixty or so years later, I rubbed my finger over an engraved swastika atop the same model camera. The original photograph, for which there is no negative, would become incorporated into a piece of artwork I made that now sits in the dark of some storage unit in Bolzano, Italy, where it belongs to a collector named Antonio Dalle Nogare. My great grandparents Fred and Erma would later change the spelling of their surname to Casewitz; my mother would later shorten it to Case. What is the effect of this kind of assimilation and what are we to make of tiny erasures that fill our genetic line and fragment our identity? Here I have chosen to share a personal anecdote in lieu of a ‘short bio.’ The task is the same: in what way does one choose to describe their own arrival?   Luke lives with his partner Carmen Winant and two sons in Columbus, Ohio. He teaches Photography + Integrated Media at Ohio University in Athens, a small, Midwestern town named after an ancient city in Europe.
Nina Strand
Nina Strand (Fellow) lives and works in Paris, France. She works as a photographer and writer, working mainly with books that combine images and text. She is also the founder and editor of the Scandinavian art journal Objektiv, founded in 2009. Before Objektiv she co-published Militær, a zine for Scandinavian photography that ran from 2006 until 2009. She writes regularly about photography for the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet. She has received a work grant from Arts Council Norway since 2012. Publications include: Arbeid, Age before Beauty, Kunstnerlønn, (self published 2016), Dr. Strand, (Journal).  New View, (self published for The National Autumn exhibition in Oslo, 2015), (female) Artist, (self published, 2015), Solo (self published, 2015), Trollet (self published, 2014), Backstage (self published, 2014), Det fiktive forhold (self published, 2013), Nykter (Akademisk publisering, 2010), So, how do you think you’re doing (Journal, 2008) and Gutta på Gølvet (Cappelen 2004).
Jo Ann Walters
Jo Ann Walters (Fellow) is a photographer and educator living in New England. Her work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, St Louis Museum of Art, and the Bibliotheque Nationale among others. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and has received support from the Kittredge Foundation, the Ferguson Award for Portraiture and the Peter S. Reed Foundation honoring distinguished writers, choreographers, filmmakers and visual artists in their fields. She was nominated for Anonymous was a Woman and the San Francisco Foundation Award, Publications include MoMA’s, Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic ComfortNew Color / New Work, LightWorks Annual and the final issue of DoubleTake. Her work will be part of the forthcoming book and exhibition, Mind The Gap, traveling to Berlin, China and Amsterdam. Her first monograph, Wood River / Blue Pool, was published by Image Text Ithaca in 2018, along with a companion book by writer Emma Kemp. She has been a faculty member at Yale University and Rhode Island School of Design and is currently head of photography at Purchase College, The State University of New York.
Carmen Winant
Carmen Winant (Faculty) is an artist, writer, and assistant professor of visual studies. In the coming year, Winant will participate in Being: New Photography 2018 at MoMA and Another Echo: In Practice at the Sculpture Center; she will also publish an artist book titled My Birth with SPBH Editions. Winant is a contributor to Frieze, Aperture, Cabinet, and The Believer Magazines. She makes study of the evocative, moving, and contradictory impulses that inform and describe feminist history, and is currently at work on an experimental book of writing about the nature of practice.