One-on-one PHOTOBOOK mentorship

Penumbra Foundation, in partnership with Image Threads Collective, is pleased to offer one-on-one mentorship.

Artists can register for individual sessions or create a series of meetings with one or more mentors to receive feedback and support for a project in progress.

Mentorship (via Zoom) is offered in slots of 30 min. Please click the drop menu below for availabilities.

Book three or more sessions at a time and receive a 15% discount with the code: MENTORBUNDLE3

Are your desired dates unavailable? Please contact us directly and we will reach out to your potential mentor.

Tim Carpenter (Illinois, 1968) is a photographer and writer who works in Brooklyn and central Illinois. He is the author of several photobooks, among them Christmas Day, Bucks Pond Road (The Ice Plant); Local objects (The Ice Plant); township (collaboration with Raymond Meeks, Adrianna Ault, and Brad Zellar; TIS/dumbsaint); Bement grain (TIS/dumbsaint); Still feel gone (collaboration with Nathan Pearce; Deadbeat Club Press); Illinois Central (Kris Graves Projects); The king of the birds (TIS books); and A house and a tree (TIS books). Local objects was included in the 2018 exhibition “American Surfaces and the Photobook” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and was listed for the Kassel Photobook Award 2018. Tim received an MFA in Photography from the Hartford Art School in 2012, and in 2015 co-founded TIS books, an independent photobook publisher.

J Carrier (b. Biloxi, Mississippi) after spending nearly a decade living and working in Africa and the Middle East, a five-year stint in Brooklyn, a return to Jerusalem in 2018, and back to Washington DC where he grew up, he now lives in central Vermont with his wife and kids. J has a BS in wildlife & fisheries science and forestry from the Pennsylvania State University (1996) and an MFA from the Hartford Art School (2012). J is an assistant professor at George Mason University. He formerly taught at Cornell University, the International Center of Photography (NYC), and Western Connecticut State. J's commissioned work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Time, Fortune, CNN, Newsweek, Men's Journal, XXL, Dazed and Confused, Le Monde, and the Financial Times garnering many awards (NY photo awards, AI+AP, Center). He was nominated for PDN30 (2016), the John Gutmann Photography Fellowship (2013 & 2012), and the Santa Fe prize for Photography (2011). His first monograph, Elementary Calculus, was published by MACK in September, 2012, and selected for numerous year end "best of" lists and was also included in the 2013 International Center of Photography Triennial. He has also published three books with TIS - untitled 1 (Vermont, 2014), untitled 2 (Vermont, 2016) - and most recently, The Folly (2021). Work from J’s recent projects, mi´raj & in circles is currently in design & production and will be published in the coming year.

Jenia Fridlyand (Moscow, 1975) is a photographer and educator based in New York City and the Hudson Valley. Her photographs and books have been exhibited in the United States and abroad. The self-published edition of Fridlyand’s book Entrance to Our Valley was shortlisted for the Paris Photo - Aperture First Photobook Award 2017, and trade editions were published by TIS Books in 2019 and 2020. She is represented by Gallery Wouter van Leuween. Fridlyand is a co-founder of Image Threads Collective and is currently the chair of the Photobook Long Term Program at Penumbra Foundation.

Nathaniel Grann (Minnesota, 1990) is a photographer and photo editor based in Lancaster, PA. Grann has previously worked as a senior photo editor in the motion picture industry and a photo editor for Shutterstock and The Washington Post. He was the co-founder of the independent photobook publisher, Empty Stretch, and is currently a co-founder of the Image Threads Collective. Grann published his first monograph Midwest Sentimental (Peperoni Books) in 2018, and has had his photographs, photobooks, and zines exhibited widely across the United States and internationally. Grann received an MFA in Photography from the University of Hartford and a BFA in photojournalism from the Corcoran College of Art + Design.

Alan Huck is a photographer, writer, and educator based in Chicago. His first monograph, I walk toward the sun which is always going down, was published by MACK and shortlisted for the 2020 Rencontres d’Arles Photo-text Book Award. He serves as a mentor in the Image Threads Collective mentorship program and teaches various interdisciplinary photography courses through the Penumbra Foundation. 

Kevin Kunstadt (New York, NY, 1982) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He received his BA in Visual Art from Brown University in 2004, and his MFA in photography from Hartford Art School’s international limited residency program in 2017. He served as the co-founder and co-director of K&K Gallery in Brooklyn, NY for three years, with a focus on promoting the work of young and un-established photographers in the New York City area, and from around the world. He has also collaborated on the design of several architectural projects that relate to vision, history, and social justice, the most recent of which was an award winning proposal for the Monument Avenue GD/GD design competition. Since 2010 Kunstadt has produced several photographic projects in book form, on subjects as varied as: asphalt road resurfacing, gunpowder, scrap metal, and “sneakers, bricks, and politics.” These have been nominated for the Mack First Book Award, and shortlisted for the Kassel, Luma Rencontres, Fiebre, and La Fabrica Dummy Awards. He collaborated with the Image Threads Collective to establish the first Photobook library in Havana, Cuba, and he has taught photography at Marist College, in Poughkeepsie, NY, as well as through workshops in Canada, and Cuba.

Adam Meeks is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker and graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. His last short film Union County premiered in competition at the 70th Berlinale, and continued on to screen at the Champs-Élysées Film Festival, Palm Springs International ShortFest, Maryland Film Festival, and numerous others. His work frequently examines rural and peripheral American communities, and aims to exist within the intersection of documentary and narrative processes. His practice is also informed by a background in photobooks, and his most recent book collaboration with his father Raymond Meeks, entitled Somersault, will be published in September 2021 by MACK. He is a 2019 Creative Culture Fellow at the Jacob Burns Film Center and a 2021 Yaddo Artist-in-Residence. He currently works as the Senior Video Producer at Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Raymond Meeks (Ohio, 1963) has been recognized for his books and pictures centered on memory, and place, the way  in which a landscape can shape an individual and in the abstract, how a place possesses you in its absence.  His books have been considered as a field or vertical plane for exploring interior co-existences, as life moves  in circles and moments and events, often years apart, unravel and overlap, informing new meanings. Raymond lives and works in the Hudson Valley (New York). His work is represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., Bibliotheque Nationale, France,and the George Eastman House, with recent solo exhibitions at Casemore Kirkeby in San Francisco and Fotografia Europea in Italy. His book Halfstory Halflife (Chose Commune, 2018) was a finalist for the Paris Photo/Aperture Photobook of the Year Award. His most recent book Ciprian Honey Cathedral, was published by MACK in late 2020. Meeks is a recent recipient of a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography.

Emma Phillips (Sorrento, 1989) is a photographer based in Melbourne, Australia. Her work, set around the focal point of the home, probes ideals of domesticity, womanhood, memory and dreams. Recent activities include a major book commission from Photo Australia and Perimeter Books, nomination for the Murray Art Museum Albury National Photography Prize, acquisition from the Art Gallery of New South Wales and an exhibition at ReadingRoom in 2019. From 2014-2019 Emma was the photobook buyer at Perimeter Books, where she implemented the Perimeter Talks program, a series of panel discussions, lectures, and more casual in-conversations with publishers, artists, curators, designers, writers and editors exploring and addressing various themes and issues relating to contemporary photographic, art and design publishing. Emma is an occasional writer and educator, contributing to programs at University of Technology, Sydney, Photography Studies College, Melbourne and Penumbra Foundation, New York City. Emma holds an MFA from the University of Hartford’s International Limited-Residency program.

Mariela Sancari (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1976) lives and works in Mexico City since 1997. Her work revolves around truthfulness and fiction in images, using personal narratives to explore the boundaries of the scope of photography as a means of representation. It refers to the affective dimension, yet not sentimental, of autobiographical work, as well as formal explorations of the medium, through questions related to staging and self-referentiality in photographic practice. Her first book Moisés (La Fábrica) was selected by several curators and reviewers as one of the Best Photobooks published in 2015. In 2017, she published her second book in collaboration with writer Adolfo Córdova: Mr. & Dr. (This book is true) a photobook aimed for children and youngsters that explores the notion of the unknown through images and text. And in 2021, The two headed horse. Reenactment in ten acts (Asunción Casa Editora), an investigation of the transit of a fixed image to a performed image. Mariela is the founder of FOLIO, Centro de la Imagen’s public photobook collection.

Arturo Soto (Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, 1981). He has published the photobooks In the Heat (2018) and A Certain Logic of Expectations (2021). Soto holds a PhD in Fine Art from the University of Oxford, an MFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York, and an MA in Art History from University College London. He curated the exhibition Foreign Correspondence at London's Architectural Association and took part in the first edition of Forecast Platform at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. His work has been exhibited internationally and has been featured in Granta, Port Magazine, Paper Journal, Phases, Punto de Fuga, Formagramma, Places, L'Intervalle, among others. It has been included in the books Primal Sight, Imaginaria, and the Subjective Atlas of Mexico. Soto also reviews photobooks about Latin America for American Suburb X.

Questions or concerns? Please contact our workshop coordinate: griffin@penumbrafoundation.org

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