Liz Deschenes (Boston, 1966) lives and works in New York. 
Since the early 1990’s, Liz Deschenes has produced a body of work that emancipates photography from its conventional definition as a document and explores the material condition of the medium and its processes. Making use of the medium’s most elemental aspects, namely paper, light, and chemicals, Deschenes creates shifting surfaces that function as sculptural or architectural rather than photographic objects. The artist’s carefully calibrated installations probe disparate histories of image production, abstraction and exhibition making while collapsing the attributed roles of the viewer and the artwork.

Her work is included in the permanent public collections of MoMA - The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Le Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; The Art Institute of Chicago; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; CCS Bard Hessel Museum, Annandale-on-Hudson; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem and Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee; ICA Boston.

Richard Learoyd (b. 1966, Lancashire, England) studied fine art photography under the landscape artist Thomas Joshua Cooper at the Glasgow School of Art, Scotland, graduating in 1990.

With an unparalleled passion for the medium and its materials, Learoyd explores the limits of photographic expression in his large-scale color and black-and-white portraits, landscapes and still lifes. Using the antiquarian process of the camera obscura (from Latin for “dark room”), Learoyd's color pictures are unique, direct-positive images produced without film negatives or digital technology. Learoyd began experimenting with this unconventional method during his post- graduate year, refining his practice in 2003 with the creation of a room-sized camera in which light-sensitive photographic paper is exposed. The resulting images are hyper-real, entirely grainless, and acutely detailed, though shallow in depth of field. Learoyd’s large-format, black-and-white photographs likewise reference the medium’s heritage, employing the negative/positive process invented by William Henry Fox Talbot nearly two centuries ago. Up to 80 inches wide, they are among the largest gelatin silver contact prints ever made.

Learoyd’s most recent body of work utilizes a new and transformative process of multiple impression printing layered with hand coated gesso on canvas. These multi-dimensional works showcase the artist’s exploration of depth, texture, time, and the relationship between photography and materiality.

Learoyd lives and works in London, England.

Jonathan Binstock is the Director and CEO of The Phillips Collection.

Leigh Ledare’s work raises questions of agency, intimacy and consent, transforming the observer into the voyeur of private scenes or situations dealing with social taboos. Using photography, the archive, language, and film, he explores notions of subjectivity in a performative dimension, his interventions putting in tension the realities of social constructions and the projective assumptions that surround them. Ledare has had numerous solo exhibitions in the US and abroad, among them: To You Who Make the Springtime, I Send My Winter, Michelle Didier, Paris (2021); L'Hôte, Office Baroque, Brussels (2019); The Plot, The Art Institute of Chicago (2018); Vokzal, The Box, Los Angeles (2016); Double Bind, Mitchell-Innes and Nash, New York (2015); Pretend You're Actually Alive, Andrew Roth, New York (2008); as well as major surveys at Charlottenborg Kunsthal, Copenhagen (2013), and WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels (2012). Ledare's works are included in the public collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and The Centre Pompidou, among others. Ledare was a 2017 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and teaches in the Sculpture MFA at Yale University.

Eli Durst is a photographic artist whose work explores the social forces and group dynamics that shape the suburban American experience. Durst’s photographs have been exhibited internationally and have been featured in Aperture, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Vogue, and The Atlantic among others. He has published three monographs: The Community (Mörel, 2020), The Four Pillars (Loose Joints, 2022), and The Children’s Melody (Gnomic 2025).

Durst lives and works in Austin, Texas, where he teaches at the University of Texas College of Fine Arts. Durst has received numerous prizes, including the 2016 Aperture Portfolio Prize, a 2017 Aaron Siskind Individual Photographer’s Fellowship Grant, and a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship.  

The Children’s Melody by Eli Durst (Gnomic Book, 2025)
About the book (from the publisher):

There’s a concept in communist China called zhuxuanlu, which refers to a central melody of Chinese life. While some level of independence or deviation is acceptable, everyone should exist within certain morally and politically acceptable parameters, in a kind of productive harmony. 

In The Children’s Melody, 2025 Guggenheim Fellow Eli Durst explores the very serious absurdities of collective identity formation, through photographs made in environments including cotillion groups, dance practices, ROTC training, and school performances.

When read together, these images defamiliarize everyday life, questioning the relationship between the individual and the institution, between the margins and the center. In sequence, they lay bare how invisible cultural forces shape us into who we become. To borrow a phrase from Judith Butler, which is itself a reformulation of Sartre: “What is done to me, and what is it I do with what is done to me?"

Joiri Minaya is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist who works in photography, digital media, film, performance, sculpture, textiles and painting. Born in New York and raised in the Dominican Republic, Minaya describes her multiculturally-informed work as “a reassertion of Self, an exercise of unlearning, decolonizing, and exorcizing imposed histories.” Minaya has recently been part of exhibitions and screenings at the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as international exhibitions like the Prospect 6 New Orleans Triennial, the Cooper Hewitt Triennial and the Sharjah Biennial 15. She is a recent recipient of the Latinx Artist Fellowship, NYSCA / NYFA Artist Fellowship, Jerome Hill Fellowship, and Artadia award, and has been an artist in residence at the International Studio & Curatorial Program, Light Work, Socrates Sculpture Park, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She's currently one of the inaugural artists in residence at the Monti Artist Studio Program in Crown Heights.