The Family Photography Symposium at NYU
Join us in celebrating Professor Gregory Pardlo and Professor Montana Ray's Family Photography Symposium at the NYUAD HQ (19 Washington Square North, New York) on Thursday, April 23rd, from 1:00 pm to 7:00 PM. RSVP Links are available below, within the event program.
About the Project
Our 19 WSN Fellowship project takes as its inspiration the Akkasah photography archive at NYU Abu Dhabi. In close collaboration with NYUAD archivists, we attend to themes of family and collecting. As an international collaboration, this project invites comparative inquiries regarding family photography collections at other NYU sites.
Event Program
- 1:00 PM Exhibition Opening of Mothering in Komunidad: Filipinos in the UAE by Xyza Cruz Bacani
1:30 PM Artist Talk with Xyza Cruz Bacani in conversation with Akkasah Archivist Jonathan Burr and NYU University Archivist Janet Bunde
RSVP Here! (For exhibition opening and artist talk)
3:00 PM Student Photography and Poetry Workshop, Translating Akkasah with Gregory Pardlo and Montana Ray
5:00 PM Public Lecture: The House Archives Built by Dorothy Berry in conversation with Laylah Amatullah Barrayn
- 7:00 PM Poetry Reading with Gregory Pardlo and Jasmine Reid with photographic translations by Montana Ray
About the Participants
Laylah Amatullah Barrayn
Laylah Amatullah Barrayn is an acclaimed documentary photographer and curator with over 25 years of experience. Her work has been exhibited globally and is featured in seminal publications, including Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present and Photography: A Feminist History. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Times and the author of We Are Present: Portraits from 2020. Her work is centered on the preservation of photographic history, with a specific focus on photographers of African descent. Barrayn holds a Master of Arts in Art and Public Policy from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and serves as a faculty member at Rutgers University, Newark, and the International Center of Photography (ICP).
Xyza Cruz Bacani
Xyza Cruz Bacani is an award-winning artist and writer based in New York. Bacani has been recognized as one of Asia Society’s Asia 21 Young Leaders, Artpil 30 Under 30 Women Photographers, Forbes’s 30 Under 30 Asia, and BBC’s 100 Women of the World. She received multiple grants from the New York State Council of the Arts, WMA Commission, the Open Society Moving Walls Foundation, and the Pulitzer Center, and was one of the Magnum Foundation Photography and Social Justice Fellows. She is also the author of We Are Like Air. Bacani’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of the City of New York, Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago, KADIST Collection, Asian Art Museum San Francisco, Foreign Correspondents Club Hong Kong, NYU Special Collections, and numerous private collections worldwide.
Dorothy Berry
Dorothy Berry is an archivist and writer whose work can be found in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Public Domain Review, and Lapham’s Quarterly. Her writing is informed by archival methodologies from a range of cultural heritage institutions, where she continues to implement creative methods to make archival collections related to Black life available more broadly.
Janet Bunde
Janet Bunde has served as the University Archivist at New York University since 2016. She earned an MA in History and a certificate in Archival Administration from NYU’s Graduate School of Arts and Science in 2007. She has worked in various roles in the New York University Archives/NYU Special Collections for the past 18 years. She also holds a BA in History, with a concentration in Peace and Conflict Studies, from Haverford College, from which she graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa.
Jasmine Reid
Jasmine Reid is a poet for the people and the author of Interlocutor Goddess (Autumn House Press), winner of the 2024 CAAPP Poetry Prize, and Deus Ex Nigrum (Honeysuckle Press, 2020). An MFA graduate of Cornell University and recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, The Jerome Foundation, and Poets House, her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, and The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, among others. She was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, has taught at Cornell University and Pratt Institute, and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York, where she is a community organizer and an assistant professor at New York University. Find her at reidjasmine.com (http://reidjasmine.com/)