2025 SDN Visual Storytelling Festival Speaker Series

What We Bring Forward
Women Photographers Influencing the Archive

Wednesday, April 2, 1:30 pm ET via Zoom

Aldeide Delgado 
Susan Meiselas
Keisha Scarville
J. Sybylla Smith, Moderator

Photo by Keisha Scarville

History is a dynamic force told through prevailing cultural, social and political viewpoints.  Archives consist of documents of the history of a place, a people, an organization or a family. Institutional archives, housed in museums, libraries and governmental agencies, are reevaluating their predominance of collecting via a colonial patriarchal framework.

Women photographers set a dynamic stage from which to look backward and forward. This panel brings together three activist artists, Susan Meiselas, Keisha Scarville and Aldeide Delgado, to discuss the archive and how a global array of female-identifying photographers utilize lens-based work to document their lived experiences. Aware of the power inherent in who tells whose story, these visual storytellers innovate and expand what constitutes the canon of visual history, simultaneously changing our understanding of the past and influencing possibilities for the future. 

Aldeide Delgado, a Cuban-born, Miami-based independent Latinx art historian and curator is the Founder & Director of Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA). A recipient of the Ellies Creator Award (2023), and the Knight Arts Challenge award (2019), Delgado is the author of Becoming Sisters: Women Photography Collectives & Organizations (2021). Prior to founding WOPHA, Delgado created the online feminist archive, Catalog of Cuban Women Photographers. Her teaching, writing and lecturing center a feminist and decolonial perspective on crucial topics of the history of photography and abstraction within Latin America, Caribbean, and Latinx contexts. She is an active member of institutional advisory boards and committees at Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Lucie Foundation, the Feminist Art Coalition and Fast Forward: Women in Photography.
 

Susan Meiselas is a New York-based documentary photographer. She is the author of over a dozen books, including Carnival Strippers (1976), Nicaragua (1981), Prince Street Girls (2016), Carnival Strippers Revisited (2022) and co-author of Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography. Meiselas is known for her documentation of human rights issues in Latin America, with works held in North American and international collections. A MacArthur Fellow (1992) and Guggenheim Fellow (2015), she received the Women in Motion Award and Deutsche Börse Photography Prize (2019), and the Erich Salomon Award of the German Society for Photography (2022). Mediations, a survey exhibition of her work from the 1970s to the present, was initiated by Jeu de Paume Paris and traveled internationally to multiple institutions. She has been President of the Magnum Foundation since 2007, advocating for expanding diversity and creativity in documentary photography. Meiselas has had one-woman exhibitions in Paris, Madrid, Amsterdam, London, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, and her work is included in international collections.
 

Keisha Scarville explores themes of loss, latency, and the elusive body. A curator and exhibiting artist her work is currently in exhibition at the ICP, Higher Pictures, CPW and Webber Gallery, LA. Other exhibition venues include the Studio Museum in Harlem, Huxley-Parlour in London, ICA Philadelphia, Contact Gallery in Toronto, the Caribbean Cultural Center, Lightwork, and The Brooklyn Museum. Her work is in the collections of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Yale University Art Gallery, the George Eastman House, Denver Museum of Art and the Detroit Institute of Art. A recipient of the Creator Lab Photo Fund (2023) and the Saltzman Prize (2023), she is currently a Visiting Professor at Harvard and faculty at Parsons School of Design. Her first book, lick of tongue rub of finger on soft wound, was shortlisted for the 2023 Aperture/Paris Photobook Awards.
 

J. Sybylla Smith is an independent curator, podcaster, and consultant specializing in concept development for artists. Her Concept Aware®:How You See & Why It Matters podcast engages global photographers, curators and critics in unscripted conversations to discuss creative practice and the photobook-making process. Smith equips visual artists with tools to bring their abstract ideas to life in image, text, book, exhibition and installation. She is on a mission to amplify the work of women and female-identifying photographers and to highlight underrepresented narratives with an intersectional lens. She has curated 30+ solo and group exhibitions featuring over 115 international photographers in venues within the U.S., Mexico, Columbia and Japan.

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