blue light speaker series

Rodrigo Valenzuela

Blue Light and The Weil Gallery at TAMU-CC welcomes Los Angeles-based Chilean artist Rodrigo Valenzuela for an exhibition of recent multimedia works. Valenzuela’s works, composed of staged scenes and structural interventions, create politically engaged, post-capitalist dialogues across photography, film, and sculptural installation to address notions of urban decline and civil disobedience.

Artist’s virtual public lecture: Friday, March 19, 5:00-6:00pm

Accessible via the College of Liberal Arts’ Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/TAMUCCcla

Website: www.rodrigovalenzuela.com

Danna Singer

Danna Singer is a photographer and educator. She received her MFA from Yale University School of Art and BFA from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. Singer's work largely focuses on the social ramifications of economic inequality, depicting the struggles of working class Americans. Her photographs were selected for The Best New Yorker Photography of 2019, and The New York Times, Year in Pictures 2019, and have been published by Der Spiegel, the ACLU, Lens Culture, LensScratch, Feature Shoot, and The New York Times Magazine. In 2020 she was named a Guggenheim Fellow and in 2018, she was awarded a residency fellowship at Yaddo and named one of PDN's 30 Emerging Photographers to Watch. She received the John Ferguson Weir Award, Yale University (2017), the Schickle-Collingwood Prize, Yale University (2016), and the Juncture Fellowship, Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights/Yale Law School (2016). Her photographs have been exhibited nationally and internationally. 

If It Rained An Ocean

This work and series of photographs is an exploration of my relationship to my family and community. The subjects of my pictures are my immediate family members, friends and neighbors from the working-class neighborhood in New Jersey where I grew up.

Website: www.dannasinger.com

MUSÉE Magazine Video: If it Rained An Ocean Danna Singer’s Portrait of the American Landscape

Yale Article: Danna Singer ART ’17 takes students on a cross-country journey to learn photographic storytelling

PDN Article: How Danna Singer Shot One Of THE NEW YORKER’S BEST PHOTOS OF THE YEAR

Deborah Bright

Deborah Bright is a Brooklyn-based artist, writer, and educator. She is particularly noted for her imagery and scholarship on queer desire and politics, as well as on the ideologies of American landscape photography and serves on the board of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York, the only museum in the world whose mission is to showcase queer visual culture. In her former academic life, she served as chair of fine art at Pratt Institute (2012–2017) and before that held a joint appointment as professor of photography and history of art/visual culture at the Rhode Island School of Design (1989–2011). Her work is in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Fogg Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Bright's photographic projects have been exhibited internationally. Her groundbreaking collection of images and writings on photography and sexuality, The Passionate Camera: photography and bodies of desire (Routledge, 1998) was a finalist for the 1999 Lambda Book Award in Visual Arts. In addition, her essays on photography and cultural issues have appeared in Art Journal, Afterimage, exposure, Views, Michigan Quarterly.

Odette England

Odette England received an MFA with Honors from the Rhode Island School of Design and a PhD from the Australian National University. Her work has shown in more than 90 solo, two-person and group exhibitions worldwide. Notable venues include: George Eastman House (Rochester, NY); Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago, IL); New Mexico Museum of Art (Santa Fe, NM); Fort Wayne Museum of Art (Fort Wayne, IN); RISD Museum (Providence, RI); Center for Photography at Woodstock (Woodstock, NY). Awards include: the Magenta Foundation Flash Forward Emerging Photographers Award (UK winner, twice) and the CENTER Project Launch Award. England has given lectures and critiques at Harvard University, Princeton University, Stanford University, Brown University, the School of Visual Arts in New York, Amherst College, the Penumbra Foundation, Kenyon College, the University of Melbourne, and the Art Gallery of South Australia, among others.

Website: www.odetteengland.com

Nathaniel Stein

Dr. Nathaniel M. Stein was appointed Associate Curator of Photography at the Cincinnati Art Museum in 2017. Stein holds a B.A. in Art History from Wesleyan University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Brown University, where his doctoral research dealt with photography in India and Britain in the nineteenth century. His recent monograph, The Levee: A Photographer in the American South (co-published by the Cincinnati Art Museum and Candor Arts, Chicago, 2020) is the first substantial scholarly study of the contemporary Indian photographer Sohrab Hura. Stein has published and organized exhibitions on internationally-established and emerging contemporary photographers from South Asia, Europe, continental North America, and the Caribbean. Prior to arriving in Cincinnati, he held curatorial positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, and the RISD Museum. He has taught the history of photography, film, and modern and contemporary art at the Rhode Island School of Design, Arcadia University, and Brown University; held research fellowships at the Yale Center for British Art and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art; and delivered lectures on nineteenth-century and contemporary visual culture at venues including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS, London), and the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Portrait of Dr. Nathaniel Stien by. Tim Tiebou