Internship Program

This unique program offers interns the opportunity to gain invaluable artistic and professional skills through direct experience with reputable artists.

2023-2024 Selected Interns & Artists

Esai Velasquez

Intern

Esai Velasquez is a New York-based photographer primarily working in different modes of portraiture. His more recent work is part of an ever-expanding project dedicated to showcasing his family members and the personal connections he’s formed with each person. His work at the Fashion Institute of Technology explores more fashion-based editorial and environmental portraiture with a wide range of subject matter.

Naima Green

Artist

Naima Green is an artist and educator who pictures individuals and communities to document their vibrant relationships to place and pleasure. Green accesses and prioritizes the nature of intimacy, safety, and self-recognition. She considers water as fluid and regenerative and presents a window into the relationship between pleasure and the complex experience of the ocean: beauty, leisure, buoyancy, and overwhelm. Oral and written histories and the archival material essential to uncovering these stories are critical to her process. By synthesizing archival research with outreach and conversation with current sitters, she frames picture-making and her artist praxis as a continuum and her still images as kinetic, living histories.

Green has had solo shows at Baxter Street CCNY and Fotografiska New York, and the Institute of Contemporary Art at VCU, Richmond, VA. She has exhibited in group shows at Mass MoCA, BRIC, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Houston Center for Photography, and others. Her works are in the permanent collections of many museums and libraries across the US, including Barnard College Library, Decker Library at MICA, Flaten Art Museum, The Getty Research Institute, Hessel Museum of Art, High Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art Library, Smart Museum of Art, and Smith College Museum of Art, amongst others.

Liv Nester

Intern

Liv Nester is an artist and student of photography based in New York City. Their work employs alternative processes, sculpture, and video techniques in order to explore themes of life, death, and interpersonal experience. They utilize a combination of traditional and unconventional mediums to evoke visceral responses and provoke contemplation on the complexities of existence. Through a multidisciplinary approach, they aim to challenge perceptions, blur boundaries, and capture the essence of human existence in its rawest form.

David Rothenberg

Artist

David Rothenberg is a photographer and educator living in New York. In recent years, Rothenberg has made his home borough of Queens the subject of several major projects. His project, Landing Lights Park was published as a monograph by ROMAN NVMERALS and was named by TIME as one of the best photography books of the year. 

Rothenberg was the recipient of the PHOTO 2021 x Perimeter International Photobook Prize for his book Roosevelt Station. Rothenberg’s photographs have been published in The New York Times, Hyperallergic, Libération, Die Zeit and The New Yorker. His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of the City of New York and numerous library special collections including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, MoMA, and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. Rothenberg received an MFA from Bard College and a BFA from Parsons School of Design.

Stevia Ndoe

Intern

Stevia Ndoe (they/she) is an interdisciplinary artist and photographer based in Brooklyn, NY. Through photography, film, and sculpture, Ndoe imagines celebratory and accessible spaces for the Black diaspora through the lens of aesthetics, culture, and the natural environment. They investigate the relationship between the body, time/memory, environment, and identity formation, centering Black experiences in their work. A student of anti-colonialism practices, Ndoe aims to deconstruct current definitions of art and provide a more inclusive and pride-centered telling of history.

Ndoe is a recipient of the HEAR US Grant (2024) and YoungArts Foundation Microgrant (2023). They have won the AIGA Worldstudio Scholarship (2022), New York Times "Coming of Age" Competition (2021), YoungArts Foundation Award in Photography (2021 & 2020), and the Scholastic Gold Portfolio in Photography (2020). They've exhibited work Photoville, 20 Cooper Gallery Space, Paul Robeson Gallery, 4Elements Studio, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Belin-Bank Art Center. They've been published by the New York Times, The Block Club Chicago, and Facing History. Ndoe will graduate with a BFA in Photography & Imaging and BA in Art History in the Spring of 2025.

Milagros de la torre

Artist

Milagros de la Torre is an artist whose work examine the image, its language and vocabulary, mostly through an autobiographical lens. Her work is conceptually layered and often questions established systems of representation and meaning. She has studied Communications Sciences at the University of Lima as well as received a B.A. (Hons) in Photographic Arts from the University of the Arts London.

De la Torre was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship (2011), The Dora Maar Fellowship (2014), The Peter S. Reed Foundation Award in Photography (2016) and was the recipient of a Merited Person of Culture medal from the Ministry of Culture in Peru (2016), the Sustainable Arts Foundation Residency Grant (2020), Hundred Heroines (2021) and the Smithsonian Artist Fellowship Award (2021). She was named the Wolf Chair in Photography (Fall 2023) at The Cooper Union, NY. She has mentored, served as dissertation advisor, and taught broadly.

Nadine zhan

Penumbra Foundation Intern

Nadine Zhan is a Brooklyn born visual artist currently studying photography at NYU Tisch. She grew up as a first generation Chinese immigrant whose photography encapsulates her culture and how enthralled she is with the subject of the human condition and female identity. Heavily drawn to color and light, she draws inspiration from her personal self discovery and how it exists in the world. She is an alumni of ICP Imagemakers and has had work published in i-D and The New York Times Magazine. She hopes to exhibit and inspire-- for now moving along day by day, taking her vitamins in the morning, enjoying the little things.

About the program

During 3 month cycles, interns are paired with practicing artists based in NYC whose work aligns with their photographic interests and goals. Interns assist, conduct research, and provide administrative and technical support while learning about contemporary art and photographic skills. Participants are encouraged to integrate into Penumbra’s rich photographic community beyond the duration of their internships.

This program is possible thanks to the vision and support of Fujifilm.