Date and Time:
October 12, 2006
6:30pm - 8:00pm
Location:
721 Broadway, Photo Department, Room 815
Tisch Alumni Panelists Moderated by Mark Jenkinson.
The Department of Photography and Imaging at Tisch offers a four-year B.F.A. program centered on the making and understanding of images. Students explore photo-based imagery as personal and cultural expression. Situated within a university, our program offers students both the intensive focus of an arts curriculum and a serious and broad grounding in the liberal arts. We are a diverse department embracing multiple perspectives, and our 130 majors work in virtually all modes of analog and digital photo-based image making and multimedia.
Our faculty and staff consist of artists, professional photographers, designers, critics, historians, and scholars offering a wide range of perspectives. Alumni from the department pursue graduate degrees, exhibit their work in galleries and museums, publish in national newspapers and magazines, work as documentarians and picture editors, produce web sites and multimedia projects, and work in museums, educational and community settings.
Panelist Bios:
Mark Jenkinson (Moderator)
Mark Jenkinson has been teaching at NYU in various capacities for over 21 years and has been working as a professional photographer for almost 30 years working for Fortune, Time, Newsweek, Vanity Fair and a host of other magazines worldwide. Advertising and corporate clients include Chase Manhattan, Citibank, Ford, Mercedes, Goldman Saks, and The New York Mercantile Exchange to name a few. He has also written over 30 feature stories for Men's Journal, Unlimited, Mens' Health, and Maxim. Mark is represented by Andrea Meislin Gallery.
Kristen Ashburn
Kristen Ashburn (www.kristenashburn.com) is a documentary photographer based in New York City. Her photographs and stories from the Middle East, Europe, and Africa have appeared in many publications including Time, Newsweek, US News & World Report, Life, and others. Ashburn has received numerous honors both inside and outside the photography community. Her awards include the National Press Photographers Association’s Best of Photojournalism (2006, 2003) and two World Press Photo prizes (2005, 2003). She received the Getty Foundation Grant 2006, Canon’s Female Photojournalist Award in 2004, and the Marty Forscher Fellowship for Humanistic Photography 2003. In 2004 she was recognized as one of Photo District New ’30 under 30 photographers’ and participated in the prestigious World Press Photo “Joop Swart” Master Class. In 2003 she was a speaker at the TED Conference (www.ted.com). Committed to humanitarianism beyond the lens, while still in college she made five trips to Romania as a volunteer working with neurologically impaired orphans, and in 1997 established an American chapter of the Romanian Challenge Appeal, becoming its first chairperson. She began to photograph the impact of AIDS in southern Africa in 2001, the year she joined the photo agency, Contact Press Images. In recent years, Ashburn’s work has taken her to Iraq a year following the US-led invasion; Israel and the Palestinian Territories where she produced stories on Jewish settlers in Gaza, suicide bombers, Palestinian Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat during his house arrest in Ramalla. She also covered the immediate aftermath of the tsunami in Sri Lanka and the spread of tuberculosis in the penal system in Russia. In addition to her humanitarian photography, Ashburn is one of the directors of “Through the Eyes of Children: The Rwanda Project,” a charity that teaches photography to Rwanda orphans of the 1994 genocide and supports them through the sale of their images (www.rwandaproject.org). Ashburn received an Associates degree at Rochester Institute of Technology and a BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 1997.
Samantha Contis
Samantha Contis graduated from the Photo & Imaging Dept. at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts in 2004. She has assisted the artist Philip Lorca diCorcia and was director of the Chelsea gallery Danziger Projects. She is currently enrolled in the MFA program at Yale University.
Wyatt Gallery
Yes, Wyatt Gallery is his real name, which is matched only by the colorful history of his young career. After graduating from NYU Tisch School of the Arts in 1997, he received the Daniel Rosenberg Travel Grant followed by the prestigious Fulbright Fellowship in 1999 to photograph in Trinidad. Gallery’s work has been featured in PDN magazine several times including PDN’s 30 under 30 and Rising Star, as well Gallery was featured in the book 25 Under 25, Up-And-Coming American Photographers by The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. An Adjunct Professor of Color Photography at University of Pennsylvania from 2002-2005, Gallery took a leave of absence to pursue his current series: Remnants: After The Storm. Remnants: After The Storm has received many awards including PDN magazine’s 2006 Photo Annual, PDN’s 2006 World In Focus competition, American Photography 22, and the International Color Awards Photojournalism Nominee. Gallery also received generous sponsorship from Kodak in order to continue this series in New Orleans. Gallery’s photographs are in numerous public and private collections including the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas and The George Eastman House, American Express, Wiley & Sons Publishing, and have been published in several books including “Black, A Celebration of A Culture” by Deborah Willis. Gallery has been commissioned by various magazines such as: The New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, Architectural Record, Newsweek, Geo Saison, Arthur Frommer’s Budget Travel, and Outside Travel, amongst others.
Katy Howe
Katy Howe graduated from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts with a degree in photography in 1996. She worked for four and half years at SABA and then Corbis SABA. After almost 5 years of working at photo agencies, she started freelance editing and researching for books and magazines. Katy is currently the photo editor at Fortune Small Business and has been working there since May 2003.
