PhotoNOLA 2021 Reviewers
- Most reviewers will be available for both in-person and virtual reviews.
- In-person participants may still request a session with any reviewer listed as ‘virtual only’, if they would like. Unless requested, in-person participants will not be scheduled for virtual reviews.
Covid Policy: We’re following the requirements for Orleans Parish (Some info here). So we’re going to require vaccination or a negative PCR test (or antigen test) taken within 72 hours. Masks will then be optional.
2021 Reviewers Bios
Linda Alterwitz (Virtual Only)
Art & Science Editor
LENSCRATCH
Las Vegas, Nevada
Linda Alterwitz a visual artist whose artwork engages photography, collage and interactive installations. Her projects focus on the unseen rhythms of the human body and our relationship to the natural world. Alterwitz’s creative practice has been informed by a fourteen-year exploration of scientific technologies that provide visualizations of our physical and cognitive states.
In 2015, Alterwitz was the recipient of the Nevada Arts Council Visual Artist Fellowship. Her work has been published in Smithsonian Magazine, Orion Magazine, The New Statesman, Musee Magazine among others. She has exhibited her work in both traditional exhibition and site-specific installations in the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, China, Spain, Israel, Germany, Greece and Poland. Alterwitz lives and works in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Elisabeth Biondi
Former Visuals Editor of the New Yorker
The New Yorker
New York City, NY
*This reviewer requires photographers to wear masks for in-person Portfolio Reviews.
Elisabeth Biondi was the Visuals Editor of The New Yorker for 15 years until she left in 2011 to work as an independent curator, writer, and teacher. She curated Subjective/Objective and Under the Bridge for the New York PhotoFestival 2011, and New Yorker Fiction/Real Photography at Steven Kasher Gallery in Chelsea. In the fall of 2011 her exhibition, Beyond Words: Photography, in the New Yorker, was the season’s opening show at the Howard Greenberg Gallery. An expanded version traveled to the Ullens Center in Beijing in 2012. Her exhibition, Widely Different: New York City Panoramas, was on view at the Seaport Museum, New York in 2012. Next she curated LIFT Off, at the Fridman Gallery in New York, as well as REFUGEE, an exhibit on view at the Annenberg Center for Photography in Los Angeles. In 2017, she curated Farida: a Syrian Tale, for the Museu da Imagen e do Som in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and most recently Lives & Still Lives, Leslie Gill and Francis McLaughlin Gill and their Circle at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York.
Most recently, Elisabeth Biondi, has been a judge in the eight-episode Sky Arts ‘Master of Photography’, which aired May/June/July, 2018 and again in 2019.
Biondi teaches at SVA Graduate School for Photography and related Media, and is a MFA Thesis Advisor. Her column Portfolio is published in Photograph magazine. She was a juror for the World Press Photography Awards and the Sony World Photography Awards. Also, in addition to numerous national and international photography juries, she participates in numerous portfolio reviews. Biondi is one of the original founders of The Photography Master Retreat, which takes place every year in the south of France. She also advises many up-and-coming photographers and edits their work.
Jonathan Blaustein
Columnist at A Photo Editor
APhotoEditor.com
Taos, NM
*This reviewer requires photographers to wear masks for in-person Portfolio Reviews.
Jonathan Blaustein is an artist, writer, and educator based in Taos, New Mexico. He received his MFA in Photography from Pratt Institute in 2004, and has exhibited widely in galleries and museums in the US, and in European festivals as well.
His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Library of Congress, the State of New Mexico, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among other institutions.
Blaustein is a weekly columnist at the popular blog aPhotoEditor.com, and spent six years as a photo critic for the New York Times. He has also written about art and photography online for The New Yorker, VICE, The Washington Post, and Hyperallergic. He taught photography at UNM-Taos for many years, and currently runs the Antidote Photo Retreat at his family horse farm outside Taos.
Jonathan Blaustein’s first monograph, Extinction Party, was published in March 2020 by Yoffy Press in Atlanta, and was featured in multiple publications, including the Washington Post, LensCulture, Photograph Magazine, The Albuquerque Journal, and the Santa Fe New Mexican.
His work is available at Obscura Gallery in Santa Fe.
Laura Blereau (Virtual Only)
Curator and Coordinator of Academic Programing at the Newcomb Art Museum at Tulane University
Newcomb Art Museum
New Orleans, LA
Based in New Orleans, Laura Blereau *virtual* is the Curator and Coordinator of Academic Programming at the Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane University. There, she works on exhibitions that highlight women artists, socially engaged art practices, and a collection that contextualizes the Newcomb Pottery movement. Her most recent major projects include Laura Anderson Barbata: Transcommunality (2021), Brandan ‘Bmike’ Odums: Not Supposed 2-Be Here (2020), the traveling group exhibition, Per(Sister): Incarcerated Women in Louisiana (2019), and Fallen Fruit: Empire (2018). Previously, Blereau served as Curator of the Hilliard University Art Museum, a 12,000 square foot exhibition space at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where she initiated a series of single-channel video art exhibitions and curated a wide range of projects including the kinetic sculpture retrospective Lin Emery: A Movement, 1957-2017.
Elizabeth Flinsch
Photography educator, curator, and editor for SHOTS Magazine
SHOTS Magazine
Saint Paul, MIN
*This reviewer requires photographers to wear masks for in-person Portfolio Reviews.
Elizabeth Flinsch is a photography educator, curator, and the editor of SHOTS Magazine based in Saint Paul, Minnesota. SHOTS is an independent print journal of black and white photography founded in 1986. Each issue, Elizabeth curates submissions, invites photographers for featured interviews, and designs the magazine from cover to cover. Elizabeth’s own artistic roots in traditional printmaking show up in her affinity for alternative photographic processes. She is deeply committed to her vision for the photography landscape as a more equitable realm for woman identified, queer, and BIPOC artists.
Daniel George (Virtual Only)
Submissions Editor
LENSCRATCH
Vineyard, UT
Daniel George is a photographic artist whose work is rooted in the medium’s documentary tradition and explores the interconnection of place and culture as it relates to communal and personal identity. Having lived as a transplant in various locations throughout his adult life, he uses the camera to study defining characteristics of the communities within which he resides. The resulting photographs are his attempt to visualize and understand the idiosyncrasies of human activity in these local cultures. George’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across the United States, and has been published internationally in both print and online publications. He is currently based out of Vineyard, UT and teaches photography at Utah Valley University. George is the Submissions Editor for Lenscratch.
Edward Hébert
Dealer and Consultant Agent for Photography and Painting
Fine Art Consultant
New Orleans, LA
A native of New Orleans, Edward Hebert has been active in the New Orleans’ art community for over twenty-eight years. Hebert’s educational background is in photography, painting, and sociology. After attending The New Orleans Center for Creative Arts from 1977-1980, he earned a B.A. in Fine Arts from the University of New Orleans in 1986, and continues to study the history of photography, art history, painting, and drawing.
Hebert served as director of A Gallery for Fine Photography in New Orleans from 1993 to 2020, where he curated exhibitions and sold photography in New Orleans. He has also sold at art fairs in New York, Basel, Switzerland, and Paris, France. In addition, Hebert oversaw inventory acquisition, conservation, framing to museum standards, and website maintenance.
Currently, he is a dealer and consulting agent for photography and painting.
Benjamin M. Hickey
Curator of Exhibitions at the Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette
Hilliard Museum
Monroe, LA
Benjamin M. Hickey is Curator of Exhibitions at the Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Most central to his curatorial practice are projects that blend social history, sense of place, and interdisciplinary collaborations. Artists with whom he has worked include Lionel Cruet, Shayne Dark, Jenny Ellerbe, Hasan Elahi, Robert Hodge, Beili Liu, Kelli Scott Kelley, Vitus Shell, Marni Shindelman & Nate Larson, James Surls, and Alberto Rey.
Hickey was most recently the Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at the Masur Museum of Art in Monroe, LA. Other institutions at which he held positions include the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; California Museum of Photography, Riverside, CA; Arts Council in Buffalo and Erie County, Buffalo, NY; and OUTSIDE GALLERY, Monroe, LA. He also worked as an Adjunct Professor at Canisius College, Buffalo, NY and Louisiana Tech University, Ruston, LA. With reference to service, he was a long standing Community Advisory Board member for KEDM, NPR’s Monroe, LA affiliate, and is currently a Trustee at Large for the Association of Art Museum Curators. Hickey earned his Master’s in the History of Art from the University of California, Riverside.
Frances Jakubek
Image maker, Independent Curator and Advocate for Photographers
Bruce Silverstien Gallery
New York City, NY
Frances Jakubek is an image maker, independent curator and advocate for photography. She is the Director of Bruce Silverstein Gallery in New York City, co-founder of A Yellow Rose Project, and past Associate Curator of the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, Massachusetts.
Recent curatorial appointments include Open Walls for the British Journal of Photography & Les Rencontres d’Arles, The Refridge Curator, Photo District News’s The Curator Awards and Save Art Space. She has been a guest writer for Don’t Take Pictures, Diffusion Magazine and for artist publications including Serrah Russell’s recent monograph tears, tears.
Jakubek has been a panelist for the Massachusetts Cultural Council’s Photography fellowships, speaker for SPE National, Washington & Lee University, and the School of Visual Arts’ Masters of Photography i3 Lecture Series. Personal works have been exhibited at The Southern Contemporary Art Gallery in Charleston, SC; Filter Space, Chicago; Camera Commons in Dover, NH; and The Hess Gallery at Pine Manor College, MA.
Jason Koxvold
Mixed Media Artist
Gnomic Book
Portland, OR
Jason Koxvold is a mixed media artist based in Portland, OR with a focus on the intersection of economics and violence. He holds a BSC in Social Science from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and has worked for the last decade on a series of long-term projects. These long term projects combine studio practice and installation works with photographs made across the globe, in places like Arctic Russia, South Africa, Afghanistan and Nigeria. Koxvold is also the founder of Gnomic Book, an imprint focused on developing challenging projects by emerging and mid-career artists in small, high-quality editions.
Sarah Leen (Virtual Only)
Founder/Editor, Visual Thinking Collective
Visual Thinking Collective
Washington, DC
Sarah Leen *virtual* became the first female Director of Photography at National Geographic Partners in 2013. In late 2019 she founded the Visual Thinking Collective, a community for independent women photo editors, teachers and curators dedicated to visual storytelling. For nearly 20 years she worked as a freelance photographer for the National Geographic magazine until 2004 when she joined the staff as a Senior Photo Editor.
Leen works with individual photographers and agencies consulting and editing projects and books including the America, Again project by the VII Photo, the 2020 FotoEvidence and World Press Photo Book Award winner HABIBI by Antonio Faccilongo, Anders Wo by Petra Barth and Like a Bird by Johanna-Maria Fritz.
Leen mentors individual photographers and teaches photography and photo editing workshops at the Missouri Photo Workshops, Maine Media Workshops, the Eddie Adams Workshop, Santa Fe Photo Workshops, Women Photograph, Visura and at the PhotoLux Festival in Lucca, Italy. She is on the Board of Directors of the International League of Conservation Photographers.
Matthew Leifheit
Editor-in-Chief of MATTE Magazine
MATTE Magazine
Brooklyn, NY
Matthew Leifheit (born 1988, Chicago, IL) is an American photographer, magazine-editor, publisher, and professor based in Brooklyn, NY. He is Editor-in-Chief of MATTE Magazine, a platform for new ideas in photography founded by Leifheit in 2010. He was formerly the photo director of Vice Magazine, and has written criticism and interviews about art and photography for Aperture, Vice, Art F City, and Time. Leifheit holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the Yale School of Art, where he was awarded the Richard Benson Prize in 2017. He is currently on faculty at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
Leifheit’s photographic work has been exhibited internationally and is held in public collections including the International Center of Photography, the Museum of Modern Art Library and Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. His photographs have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Time Magazine.
Devon Lord
Editor-in-Chief at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press
University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press
Lafayette, LA
Devon Lord is an editor primarily focused on nonfiction and academic histories, with some additional experience in fiction, poetry, and art/photography. Currently, she is the editor-in-chief at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, where she manages the selection, development, and editorial direction of ten to fifteen works each year. The press’s catalogue focuses chiefly on works related to Louisiana history and culture, as well as pieces created by Louisiana-based authors.
Prior to joining UL Press in 2019, Lord worked for Gibbs Smith Publisher in Salt Lake City, Utah, where she served as project managing editor for the education department. In her time there, she was responsible for developing social studies textbooks to match state-specific standards for elementary and middle grades, including two world history textbooks that are currently used in schools across the country. Her additional experience includes time spent at the State Department and the Smithsonian in Washington, DC.
Lord holds an MA in Global, International, and Comparative History from Georgetown University and a BA in History from the University of Texas at Austin.
Russell Lord
Photography Historian, Writer, and the Freeman Family Curator of Photographs at the New Orleans Museum of Arts
New Orleans Museum of Art
New Orleans, LA
Russell Lord is a photography historian, writer, and the Freeman Family Curator of Photographs at the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA). Lord’s curatorial career spans two decades, with work experience in five museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Yale University Art Gallery. His deepest area of expertise is the origins of photography, but Lord has written and lectured widely on almost every moment in the history of photography.
Lord has written or edited more than a dozen publications, including Looking Again: Photography at the New Orleans Museum of Art (2018), and Gordon Parks: The Making of an Argument (2013). His recent exhibitions include: Photography, Sequence, and Time (2012-13); Ten Years Gone (2015); and Something in the Way: A Brief History of Photography and Obstruction (2016-2017). Mr. Lord has also taught undergraduate and graduate courses, and served as guest lecturer in universities across the country. Much of his research focuses on the relationships between photography and other visual media.
Richard McCabe
Curator of Photography at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art
Ogden Museum of Southern Art
New Orleans, LA
Richard McCabe is a curator, writer and photographer based in New Orleans. He received an MFA in Studio Art from Florida State University in 1998. Also in 1998, he received a Fellowship to New York University to attend the American Photography Institute, National Graduate Seminar. From 1998 – 2005 he lived in New York City where he worked for numerous art galleries and museums including – The International Center for Photography, Robert Miller Gallery and the El Museo del Barrio. He was also an Adjunct Professor of Photography at Pratt Institute, New York City and Montclair State University, Montclair, New Jersey.
In 2005, He moved to New Orleans and has worked within the curatorial department at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art for the past 16 years. In 2010, he became the Curator of Photography at the Ogden Museum. He has curated over 35 exhibitions including – Eudora Welty: Photographs from the 1930s and 40s, The Mythology of Florida, Self Processing: Instant Photography and Seeing Beyond the Ordinary, New Southern Photography and Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body: The Work of RaMell Ross.
Richard McCabe’s thoughts and writings on photography have been published in the New York Times, Time, National Public Radio(NPR), Louisiana Cultural Vistas, Spot, The Bitter Southerner, HOTSHOE and LENSCRATCH magazine.
Mr. McCabe is interested in reviewing photographic work that deals with issues and subject matter both within and outside the American South. Of particular interest are – photojournalism, documentary, portrait, landscape, and conceptual photography.
Sasha Patkin
Senior Photo Editor at Harvard Business Review
Harvard Business Review
Brighton, MA
*This reviewer requires photographers to wear masks for in-person Portfolio Reviews.
Sasha Patkin is the Senior Photo Editor at Harvard Business Review, where she commissions editorial portraits and conceptual shoots, as well as researches, sources, and licenses conceptual and fine-art photography for the magazine. She studied literature, photography, and visual culture at Bard College and Georgetown University and has previously worked for magazines and media outlets such as People, The Village Voice, LensCulture, and The New York Photography Diary. Patkin is interested in seeing photography of all kinds and especially portraiture, personal projects, and fine-art photography.
Brian Piper
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Assistant Curator of Photography at the New Orleans Museum of Art
New Orleans Museum of Art
New Orleans, LA
*This reviewer requires photographers to wear masks for in-person Portfolio Reviews.
Brian Piper is the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Assistant Curator of Photography at the New Orleans Museum of Art. He completed his Ph.D. in American Studies at the College of William and Mary in 2016, with the assistance of fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution and Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. His research focuses on 20th century African American photography, vernacular uses of photographs, and histories of race and photography.
Prior to his arrival in New Orleans, Piper held a variety of teaching and curatorial positions at the College of William and Mary, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and Valentine Richmond History Center. At NOMA, his curatorial credits include: You Are Here: A Brief History of Photography and Place (2019), Lee Friedlander in Louisiana (2018), Beyond the Frame: Photography and Native American Lives (2017), and the multi-media exhibition Changing Course: Reflections on New Orleans Histories (2018).
Piper is currently developing an exhibition about the work of African American studio photographers during the Long Civil Rights Movement.
Shane Rocheleau
Photographer, Writer, Book Artist, and Editor for Gnomic Book
Gnomic Book
Portland, OR
Shane Rocheleau is a photographer, writer, book artist, and editor for Gnomic Book. He has served as a photography professor at several institutions and is now proprietor of Rocheleau Art Coaching. Rocheleau Art Coaching is a service designed to advance the notion that art should inform and awaken artist and viewer alike, advancing and supporting community not capital. Rocheleau is primarily interested in lyrical documentary, appreciates a poetic turn and strong sequencing, and is eager to see complex, socially critical work
Dr. H Alexander Rich
Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Polk Museum of Art and Chair of the Department of Art History and Museum Studies at Florida Southern College
Polk Museum of Art
Lakeland, FL
Dr. H Alexander Rich is the Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Polk Museum of Art and Chair of the Department of Art History and Museum Studies at Florida Southern College. At Florida Southern, he is also Associate Professor of Art History and holds the George and Dorothy Forsythe Endowed Chair in Art History and Museum Studies. Dr. Rich is a specialist in Modern and Contemporary art history, with a particular focus on European and American art of the 19th and 20th centuries. He earned his Ph.D. in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and his A.B. from Dartmouth College.
Dr. Rich’s research focuses frequently on the experiential role of the viewer, on histories that have yet to be told, and on the concepts of liminality, in-between-ness, and insider-outsider status in the history of art, especially with regard to artists who are often understudied, overlooked, or who grapple with feelings of “Otherness.”
A native of New York City, Dr. Rich is the curator of far-ranging and acclaimed museum exhibitions, including Masters of Spain: Goya and Picasso, Renoir: Les Études, Rembrandt’s Academy, Chagall: Stories into Dreams, Toulouse-Lautrec and the Belle Époque, and The Von Wagner Code at the Polk Museum of Art. Before moving to Florida in 2014, Dr. Rich taught previously in both the History of Art Department at the Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York and in the City University of New York system. Prior to joining the staff of the Polk Museum in 2017 and becoming its executive director in 2019, he has also worked in both curatorial and education capacities at museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Hood Museum of Art in Hanover, NH.
Leslie-Claire Spillman
Artist and Arts Professional
SPILLMAN BLACKWELL FINE ART
New Orleans, LA
Leslie Claire Spillman is an artist and arts professional with an art degree from Xavier University. All things considered, she has 17+ years of experience in gallery sales and curating. Spillman was the longtime Director of Soren Christensen Gallery in the heart of the vibrant New Orleans Arts District, and curated hundreds of shows for the space in her tenure there, including 11 exhibitions for the PhotoNOLA festival. As a gallerist and professional photographer for almost as long, Spillman has cultivated a long list of clients including the trade, private and corporate clientele. She’s honed a curatorial eye that is respected in her art community and has been tapped to be juror or reviewer for a number of competitions both locally and nationally in art and photography.
Recent assignments include selection for Forsaken at the Southeast Center for Photography, being the sole juror for the Individual Artist Fellowship in the Visual Art and Mural Arts for the Tennessee Arts Commission, and the selection committee for nationally renowned Unframed Mural Project in New Orleans, now in its fourth round. In August 2020, she established SPILLMAN | BLACKWELL Fine Art, initially a virtual gallery and consultancy, which opened a brick-and-mortar location in the Arts District in April 2021 and represents a large and growing roster of artists working in a variety of media and processes, including renowned photo artists Abdul Aziz, Gabriel Isak, Brooke Shaden, and Kimberly Witham. She is also the current sitting President of the New Orleans Arts District Association.
Daniel E. Stetson
Executive Director of the LSU Museum of Art
LSU Museum of Art
Baton Rouge, LA
Daniel E. Stetson has over 40 years of executive museum and curatorial leadership experience, including public and private universities, government-based and private not-for-profit organizations. Stetson assumed the position of Executive Director of the LSU Museum of Art in January 2016. He has more than doubled the photography collections holding since arriving in Baton Rouge. Before coming to LSU, Stetson served as executive director of the Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga, Tenn. Prior to that, he was the executive director of the Polk Museum of Art in Lakeland, Fla., for nearly 15 years.
Stetson has also worked and lived in Texas, Iowa, and New York. Stetson holds a BA in Art History from the State University of New York at Potsdam and an MFA in Museology [Museum Studies] from Syracuse University. He is a 2010 graduate of the Getty Museum Leadership Institute at Claremont Graduate University in Los Angeles. He is active in his field regionally and nationally, serving on numerous boards and as an AAM accreditation team member. He continues to believe that all art is local, and that great art happens everywhere.
