Tia-Simone Gardner is an artist, educator, and Black feminist learner. Her hybrid practice enacts the Black geographic, long histories – some documented, some not -between black folks and the fabricated environment. Gardner grew up in Fairfield, Alabama and received her BA in Art and Art History from the University of Alabama in Birmingham. In 2009 she received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Practices and Time-Based Media from the University of Pennsylvania. In 2018, Gardner received a Phd in Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota where she completed a practice-based dissertation on Black folks, mobility and the history of small (now tiny) house practices, titled: ‘Sensing Place: HouseScale, Black Geographies, and a Humanly Workable City.’ . She is a 2023–24 McKnight Visual Artist Fellow and a 2024 NYFA, Anonymous Was a Woman Grantee and she’s currently working on a project about Fairfield, her elders, and the geologic time that made her home(town) a profitable racial landscape for the US Steel. Alongside this work, she continues to teach and develop projects related to rivers, particularly, the Mississippi River, and maritime history through her work on a series of floating camera obscuras, developing a practice of social photography.
Alisa Swindell is Associate Curator of Photography at the Hood Museum of Art. She joined as the museum’s inaugural photography curator. Her exhibitions include And I’m Feeling Good: Relaxation and Resistance, An Instant Out of Time: Shaping a Collection, Femme is Fierce: Femme Queer Performance in Photography, and Visual Kinship. She has previously worked at the Block Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, Gallery 400, and the Saint Louis Art Museum. Swindell has been published in Re-Envisioning American Art, Newcity, Gastronomica, and the catalogues for Who Says, Who Shows, What Counts, and Let Me Be an Object that Screams. She has also been an independent curator, art reviewer, adjunct art history professor, and an arts administrator. She is ABD in art history at the University of Illinois – Chicago, holds MAs from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of New Orleans and an AB from Bryn Mawr College.
Stephanie Hueon Tung is the Byrne Family Curator of Photography at the Peabody Essex Museum, where she leads the interpretation and presentation of the museum’s growing photography collection, which spans the 19th century through today. Her research focuses on the global history of photography, transnational art exchanges, translation, and notions of artistic labor. Tung served as co-curator or assistant curator for Jung Yeondoo: Building Dreams; As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic; the award-winning Power and Perspective: Early Photography in China; and A Lasting Memento: John Thomson’s Photographs Along the River Min.Most recently, she served as guest-editor for Aperture’s summer 2023 issue, Being and Becoming: Asian in America.
Prior to joining PEM in 2018, Tung worked at the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Beijing as a curator and director of international affairs. She has published widely on photography and contemporary art from Asia, including as a contributor to Aperture and the Trans-Asia Photography Review and as a contributing author to The Chinese Photobook(Aperture, 2015), Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World (Guggenheim, 2017), and Ai Weiwei: Beijing 1993–2003 (MIT Press, 2019). Tung holds a B.A. from Harvard University and is a Ph.D. Candidate at Princeton University.
Carla Williams is a photographer, archivist, editor, and writer born and raised in Los Angeles. A graduate of Princeton University and the University of New Mexico, she is the author of two histories of photography including The Black Female Body: A Photographic History with Deborah Willis. Her first monograph, Tender, was published in 2023 by TBW Books and received the Aperture/Paris Photo First PhotoBook Award. Williams is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow. She exhibits with Higher Pictures in New York and lives in New Orleans.