The Center for Photography at Woodstock Announces 2023 Woodstock Artist-in-Residency Program

Tamara Cedré was born in Brooklyn, New York and raised in Central Florida, often visiting Puerto Rico— where her family is from. As a lens-based artist and educator, Cedré uses documentary forms to reveal the conditions of underrepresented communities. Her artistic practice addresses issues at the nexus of land, labor, migration and identity. Cedré received her MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art and has been the recipient of awards and grants from the Center for Creative Citizenship, the Joan Mitchell Foundation and the California Arts Council. She is currently a Visiting Professor at Pitzer College and lives/works along the route of the supply chain between Los Angeles and the Inland Empire.

Alex Delapena is an artist who is hearing impaired and uses hearing aids. He was born in the Philippines, and raised in Honolulu, Hawai’i. His art practice begins with curiosities and playful improvisations to question how multiple gestures will be rendered together with photography. He merges drawing, painting, and sculpture to create scenes for the camera. Delapena is inspired by shadow puppetry and theater as a visual aesthetic for world-building. He often looks towards the representations of historical images by focusing on the uncanny sensations felt to view a photograph that has aged physically. His investigations lead into different cultural histories to bring stories resurfaced in another light to bridge the past and present together.

Delapena currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California and is an art instructor for the Los Angeles Community College District. He received his MFA (2022) from the University of California, Riverside and his BFA (2015) at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He was an artist in residence at 3331 Arts Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan (2020). Delapena’s most recent exhibitions include: Soft Traces with Daniel Arthur Mendoza at Human Resources, Los Angeles, California and selected group exhibitions: After/Image 01: The Third Terrain, by After/Time Collective, Portland, Oregon, Books and Things at Helen J Gallery, Los Angeles, California and Birds Eye View, Aupuni Space, Honolulu, Hawaii. Delapena was also shortlisted for the 2022 St Elmo Residency in Austin Texas, and the LENSCRATCH 2022 Student Prize: 25 to Watch.

Kearra Amaya Gopee (they/them) is an anti-disciplinary visual artist from Carapichaima, Kairi (the larger of the twin-island nation known as Trinidad and Tobago), living on Lenape land (New York). Previously, they participated in residencies at Skowhegan, Red Bull Arts Detroit and NLS Kingston in Jamaica. Their work has been exhibited at venues such as documenta15, Flux Factory, White Columns, and at film festivals internationally. Previously, they have been awarded fellowships at the Leslie Lohman Museum, Queer|Art and the Global Fund for Women. In 2023, they will be in residence at MacDowell as well as Headlands Center for the Arts. desire paths, their first book of poetry, will be published by Press Press in the summer this summer. They have guest lectured at Emory University, Rutgers University, and the Caltech-Huntington Program in Visual Culture, among others. They hold an MFA from UCLA with a concentration in Interdisciplinary Studio and a BFA in Photography and Imaging from New York University. Currently, they live and work between Trinidad and Tobago and New York City.

Naima Green is at first a lover and a lover at last.

Between those points are pictures and even sonic. Beneath those pictures and even sonic are dreams and spit containing a want. Naima Green carries the want inside her throat and drips it out with a lens. Often, light.

As an artist, she senses. As a sensualist, she’s made. Her work celebrates the sweet and uncomfortable mechanisms of intimacy, whose Latin root means inmost, and the inmost mechanism of Naima Green is care. And ass. An Aquarian angel, she is a friend who befriends — befriending metal, loss, possibility, and tears. Her makings are drenched by the readiness to be unmade. To be undone. Based in New York, Naima Green bastes in the sea.

Her works have been featured in exhibitions at ICA VCU, Baxter Street CCNY, Fotografiska NY, Smart Museum of Art, MASS MoCA, ICP, Houston Center for Photography, Bronx Museum, BRIC, Gracie Mansion Conservancy, Studio Museum in Harlem, and Arsenal Gallery. Her works are in the collections of Barnard College Library, Decker Library at MICA, Fleet Library at RISD, ICP Library, MoMA Library, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, National Gallery of Art, Olin Library, Smart Museum of Art, Teachers College, Columbia University.

Naima Green MFA in Advanced Photographic Studies from Bard College, an MA in Art & Art Education from Teachers College, Columbia University, and a BA in Urban Studies & Sociology from Barnard College. She is the Harnish Visiting Artist and Lecturer in Photography at Smith College.

S*an D. Henry-Smith is a artist, writer, and collaborative practitioner engaging Black experimentalisms in and across poetry, photography, sound, and performance. They have received awards and fellowships from the Fulbright Program, The Poetry Project, and Poets House, among others. Henry-Smith collaborates with Imani Elizabeth Jackson as mouthfeel; their book Consider the Tongue (2019) probes histories of aquatic labor and Black food through cooking, poetry, and ephemeral practices. They are the author of two chapbooks, Body Text (2016) and Flotsam Suite: A Strange & Precarious Life, or How We Chronicled the Little Disasters & I Won’t Leave the Dance Floor Til It’s Out of My System (2019). Wild Peach (2020), was published by Futurepoem, and shortlisted for the PEN Open Book Award. “in awe of geometry & mornings” (2021), exhibited at White Columns, brought to scale photographs from the book alongside a series of readings and conversations programmed with their collaborators. They are also the director of the short film Lunar New Year (2021).

Myles Loftin is a photographer, director and DJ based in Brooklyn. Brands like Google, Calvin Klein, and Everlane commission him for ad campaigns, and publications like Out, Garage, and Interview turn to him for editorials that resonate with discerning audiences. At its core Myles’ work, which focuses on portraiture, is driven by his desire to tell honest stories about underrepresented and misrepresented groups—because as a queer Black man, he knows the power of visibility. He has spoken in spaces such as Yale, SXSW, and The Dutch Design Festival and exhibited in New York, Paris and Los Angeles.

Yael Malka was born and raised in The Bronx with a short stint in Kibbutz Kinneret, Israel. She is a queer woman of Middle Eastern descent. She graduated from Pratt Institute with a BFA in photography and minor in art history. In 2021, she published The Views with TIS Books and won The prestigious 30 Photographers award (AKA PDN 30) which is given to 30 nominated photographers worldwide annually. Malka has been published in the British Journal of Photography and Dear Dave. Solo shows include Where’s the Invitation at The Leslie-Lohman Museum and Almost Touching at The Rubber Factory. She is one-third of the artist initiative Memory Foam, and prior to a hiatus, they created installations, curated exhibitions & programming and produced an artist interview video series. She is currently working on another book about queer dancers set to be published by Chronicle Books in Spring 2024. Alongside her art practice, she’s a freelance photographer and often shoots commissions for the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Vogue, Time and The Cut.

Allie Tsubota (she/hers) is a photographer exploring intersections of race, visuality, and the formation of historical memory. Her work spans large-format photography, video, photographic and filmic archives, and text. Through contemporary and archival practice, she pursues questions of history, subjectivity, spectatorship and language, and in their discontinuities across transnational space and time.

Notable awards Tsubota has received include Aperture and Google’s Creator Lab Photo Fund (2021), the Center for Photographic Art Artist Award (2021), the Henry Wolf Award for Photographic Excellence (2021), and the Lenscratch Student Prize First Place (2021). She has been a Runner-Up for MoCP’s Snider Prize (2022), and a shortlisted artist for the Aperture Portfolio Prize (2022) and the Magnum Counter Histories Award (2022). Tsubota has exhibited in New York, California, and Rhode Island, with an upcoming solo exhibition at TILT Institute for the Contemporary Image in Philadelphia, PA (Apr–Jun 2023). Tsubota received an MFA in Photography from Rhode Island School of Design in 2022. She has most recently been an artist-in-residence with ARCUS Project in Ibaraki, Japan (Aug–Dec 2022).

Justin J Wee is a Chinese-Malaysian and Australian visual artist now based in Brooklyn. As a self-taught hobbyist in Sydney, Justin realized his love of photography through the community he found as an early adopter of Instagram over a decade ago. Using his own body as his subject allowed him to discover this art in a low stakes way, and helped him step into a creative voice he had never been allowed to cultivate.

When he moved to New York in 2016, he became a part of artistic collective Nomadique where he worked as a community chef for monthly artist dinners that would be pivotal in laying the groundwork for his future. A turning point in Justin’s career came at the start of the coronavirus pandemic when he was asked by The New York Times to make a virtual portrait of Taylor Mac, his first commission for their Arts and Leisure section. Later on that year he was asked by The New York Times to participate in a portfolio of 20+ Asian photographers, responding to the prompt of how we were experiencing love in a time of intense hatred towards our community. One of the photos he made for this, alongside his best friend Heather Sten, incubated his exploration of drag.

He was signed by Rocket Science Studio at the end of 2020 and added commercial work to his portfolio. Milestones in 2021 included photographing A24’s “Horror Caviar” cookbook, and casting/photographing three generations of queer activists for Apple’s Pride celebration. This was also the first year that Justin stepped on to a stage to perform in drag. In 2022 he photographed his first out-of-home campaign for Fly By Jing. He was a finalist for Young Guns 18 and Young Guns 20, and was a 2021 artist-in-residence at Spruceton Inn.

Zhidong Zhang (b. Hunan, China) is a photographer currently living and working in Boston. They received an MFA in photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Informed by their upbringing from a conservative Chinese family as a queer person, Zhidong’s work explores the intersection of representation, identity construction, and the role of imagery in contemporary culture.

Zhidong’s work has been exhibited internationally including SPACE Gallery, Centre régional de la photographie, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, and has appeared in i-D Magazine, The New York Times, The New Yorker, QUEER|ART, Der Greif, BOOOOOOOM, and among others. They are a recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship and a finalist for the Robert Giard Grant. They were an artist-in-residence at MASS MoCA, and most recently, a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. They are currently an A.I.R at Boston Center for the Arts.