Chris Berntsen is a New York City-based artist who spends much of his year traveling. His photography is a documentation of the interconnected punk, queer and skateboarding communities. Chris graduated from New York University and exhibits slideshows in any space into which he can plug a projector. http://www.chrisberntsen.com/

 

Blakely Thomas Dadson was born in San Jose, California, the offspring of a laid-back Canuck and a Rock-n-Roll Queen. He spent his formative years drawing, playing the piano and riding skateboards. In the early ’90s he got obsessed with Dancehall Reggae music and years later ended up writing his masters thesis on the subject. Dadson currently lives and works in Portland, Oregon with his best friend Viviana, to whom he has been married for over eight years. http://www.lordblakely.com/

 

Sean Fader was raised in Ridgewood, New Jersey and has spent most of his life as an actor—acting, singing and dancing since he was five years old. After attending Northwestern and The New School University he performed on several national tours with stops both on and off-Broadway. He later earned his MA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recently Fader was named A Blade of Grass Fellow for 2012-2013. Fader currently lives and works in New York. http://www.seanfader.com/

 

Lisa Fairstein is an artist living in New York, constructing image-based works that mix a complicated embrace of seductive images with an engagement of the process of making pictures, to consider constructs of reality and fantasy in a culture obsessed with the image of an image. Born in New York, Fairstein received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts. http://www.lisafairstein.com/

 

Gregory Halpern grew up in Buffalo, New York and currently teaches Photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He holds a BA in History and Literature from Harvard University and an MFA from California College of the Arts. He has published three books of photographs. His most recent, A (J&L Books, 2011), was made on a series of road trips through the American Rustbelt. The book is a finalist for the International Photobook Award Kassel and will be featured in The Photobook: A History, Volume 3, by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger. http://www.gregoryhalpern.com/

 

Jessica Ingram’s practice includes multi-media non-fiction narrative, public art commissions and community-based programming. Her work is motivated by her desire to understand how people relate, what they long for and what motivates the choices they make. Jessica’s work has been published and exhibited internationally. Ingram is currently an Assistant Professor in Undergraduate Photography and Graduate Fine Arts at California College of the Arts and Interim Chair of the Photography Program. http://jessingram.com/home.html

 

Jeremy Kost is known on the New York circuit as “the Polaroid artist.” While the digital wave continues to gather force in contemporary art, Kost creates art with his tried-and-true Polaroid cameras. Rather than depending on lighting, make-up or styling Kost’s work relies on the integrity of the moment to expose the reality of celebrities and the fashion and art elite in compelling, unstaged Polaroid photographs. http://jeremykost.com/

 

Noah Krell currently lives, works and teaches in San Francisco, California. Noah is a lens-based artist whose videos and photography have been exhibited internationally in solo and group shows. His current work draws on physical interactions between individuals to explore the complexity of relationships; the weight of personal history; and struggle, intimacy and empathy. http://www.noahkrell.com/

 

Steve Locke is an artist and educator living and working in Boston, Massachusetts. His work has been shown internationally in numerous solo and group exhibitions. Locke received both his BFA and MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where he is currently an Associate Professor of Art Education and the Coordinator of Graduate Programs in Art Education. http://www.stevelocke.com/

 

Philip Metz is a half German-half Ghanaian artist working with themes related to identity, history and the relationship of contemporary cultures towards one another. He studied photography and fine arts and earned a Masters level diploma from the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich in 2005. Metz has participated in various national and international exhibitions. Notably, he was part of the Prêt-à Partager project, a touring exhibition that visited various countries in the African continent. http://www.philipmetz.de/

 

Richard Mosse is driven by an ambivalence toward photography and a desire to revisit and even rewrite traumatic cultural histories. His work is located in the space between fiction and reality, seeking to explore and subvert photographic genres in order to unpack history and try to understand how the world is written. Born in 1980 in rural Ireland and now based in New York, Mosse will represent Ireland in the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. Mosse received an MFA from Yale University and a postgraduate degree in fine art from Goldsmiths after first receiving his BA in English Literature from King’s College London. His work is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. http://www.richardmosse.com/

 

Eva O’Leary is an artist currently dividing her time between New York City and Ireland. Using photography, text and video, her work investigates issues such as identity formation and human behavioral patterns on the backdrop of wider social, cultural and philosophical implications. She is currently working on The Middle Kingdom, a project that examines disappointment in relation to the Celtic Tiger. She received her BFA from California College of the Arts. http://evaoleary.com/

 

Michael Ratulowski is a conceptual artist working across a variety of different media, exploring the notions of race and identity within contemporary US culture. He received his BA with a focus in sculpture from DePaul University in Chicago and his MFA from Parsons The New School for Design in New York City. Ratulowski’s work has been exhibited in numerous galleries across the United States since 2004.
http://www.michaelratulowski.com/

 

Bayeté Ross Smith is an artist, photographer and educator living and working in Harlem, New York. Initially a photojournalist with the Knight Ridder Newspaper Corporation, he has since had his work exhibited internationally in numerous solo and group exhibitions, film festivals and publications. Smith is currently the Associate Program Director for KAVI (Kings against Violence Initiative), a violence prevention nonprofit organization in New York that has a partnership with Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn. http://bayeterosssmith.com/home.html

 

Matthew Salacuse, a native New Yorker, has been shooting professionally for over 14 years. Matthew specializes in editorial portraiture and documentary photography. He has had solo gallery shows at Wall Space Gallery (New York 2003), Emporium Gallery (Montreal 2008) and K Galeria (Lisbon 2011). http://salacuse.com/

 

Paul Mpagi Sepuya lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He studied photography and imaging at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally in New York, Los Angeles, Basel, Sydney, Toronto, Paris, Berlin and Hamburg. Sepuya’s work has been featured and reviewed in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Interview, Capricious, V, Paper and BUTT, among other publications. http://www.paulsepuya.com/

 

Travis Somerville, born in Atlanta, Georgia, currently lives and works in San Francisco, California. A student at the Maryland Institute College of Art and the San Francisco Art Institute, Somerville was a 2011 Artadia Artistin- Residence at the International Studio and Curatorial Program, NYC. He also received the Joan Mitchell Foundation 2010 Painters & Sculptors Grant. Somerville’s work has been included in numerous national and international solo and group exhibitions and his work reviewed by Artforum, Art in America and The Los Angeles Times, among others. http://travissomerville.com/