Internship Program
This unique program offers interns the opportunity to gain invaluable artistic and professional skills through experience with reputable artists and their archives.
2025 Selected Interns & Artists
Clara Kraus
Intern
Clara Kraus is a Hawai‘i-born, New York-based photographer and BFA candidate at Parsons School of Design. Her work often blends self-portraiture with constructed or natural environments to explore themes of memory, identity, and place.
Rooted in a tactile, hands-on process, she uses the camera to examine relationships—between herself and loved ones, between body and place, between the truth of a moment and the fiction of how we remember it. She is particularly interested in how identity is shaped through connection, and how performance can surface emotional truths.
Her work holds space for contradiction: presence and absence, love and pain, memory and imagination. Through image-making, she explores not only what she remembers, but how she remembers—and how those recollections speak to where she comes from and who she is still becoming.
Nina Berman
Artist
Nina Berman is a documentary photographer, filmmaker, journalist and educator. Her work explores American politics, militarization, environmental issues and post violence trauma. She is the author of Purple Hearts – Back from Iraq, (Trolley, 2004) portraits and interviews with wounded American veterans, Homeland, (Trolley, 2008) an examination of the militarization of American life post September 11, and An autobiography of Miss Wish (Kehrer, 2017) a story told with a survivor of sexual violence which was shortlisted for both the Aperture and Arles book prizes. Additional fellowships, awards and grants include: the Gugggenheim Fellowship in Photography, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the World Press Photo Foundation, Pictures of the Year International, the Open Society Foundation, the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, the MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellowship and the Aftermath Project. Her work has been exhibited at more than 100 international venues from the Whitney Museum Biennial to the concrete security walls at the Za'atari refugee camp in Jordan. Public collections include the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of the City of New York, the Harvard Art Museums and the Bibliothèque nationale de France among others. She has participated in workshops around the world for young photographers and is a professor at Columbia Journalism School where she directs the photojournalism/documentary photography program.
Vivien KS
Intern
Vivien KS is a photographer and writer from Queens. On large format, medium format, and 35mm film, her work tests the physics theory of the “observer effect”: that the subject innately behaves differently under observation—or, in the case of photography, in front of a lens. Previously, Vivien worked at Raw Messina, a photography gallery and darkroom in Rome, and the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin; her work was published in the latter’s annual magazine Mosaic. She currently works at Columbia School of the Arts' darkroom and print lab and volunteers at the Bronx Documentary Center. When she’s not holed up in the darkroom, you can find her on a Citi bike or reading a book.
Lola FlaSH
Artist
Lola Flash’s work explores the intersection of race, sexual identity, aging, and social justice activism, particularly focusing on the visibility and empowerment of marginalized queer communities, especially queer women of color. Through portraiture, they seek to engage individuals often considered invisible, using photography as a tool to amplify stories and challenge conventional norms. Their practice is deeply rooted in personal experience as an active member of ACT UP during the AIDS crisis, informing their commitment to social change and advocacy.
Their compositions are influenced by themes of Afrofuturism, Black identity, and gender fluidity, creating visual narratives that reflect the complexity of identity in both contemporary and historical contexts. Flash seeks to deepen our understanding of art's transformative potential to challenge, question, and reshape the societal narratives that drive systemic change.
ASSANE SY
Intern
Assane is a Brooklyn-based photographer from Northern Senegal whose work explores the evolving relationship between tradition, culture, and self. Drawing from a blend of local heritage and global visual references, his photography reflects a deep interest in how communities navigate identity and authorship across space and time. Working primarily through the lenses of Portraiture, Fashion, and Fine Art, Assane creates images that challenge exclusionary frameworks within contemporary art, offering instead a visual language grounded in care, complexity, and presence. He is an alumnus of the International Center of Photography, the NYFA Immigrant Artist Program, and ArtsConnection. His work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, the New York Lives Art Gallery, the Africa Center, ICP, Photoville, and Soho Photo Gallery, among others. Through his practice, Assane contributes to an emerging generation of artists reshaping discourses around representation, cultural memory, and what it means to belong, both locally and globally.
KATSU NAITO
Artist
Katsu Naito is a Japanese-born photographer who has lived in New York City since 1983. Known for his portraiture and street photography, Naito’s work centers on individuals living at the margins of society—approaching each subject with a quiet, observant eye and deep respect for their dignity.
In 2010, he released West Side Rendezvous, a groundbreaking series of portraits capturing trans women sex workers in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District in the early 1990s. Celebrated for its intimacy and rare access, the project marked Naito’s emergence as a powerful documentary voice. His second monograph, Once in Harlem (2017, TBW Books), is a lyrical study of life in Harlem during the late 1980s and early 1990s, a period during which he lived in the neighborhood and formed long-standing relationships with its residents.
Naito’s practice is defined by patience and sensitivity, often spending extended periods with his subjects before photographing them. His images are grounded in stillness and emotion, capturing the humanity of everyday lives with subtle power.
He continues to live and work in New York, creating photography that bridges cultures, time, and memory through the lens of lived experience.
About the program
This 4 month intensive internship provides young artists with the opportunity to digitize a project from an artist’s archive using Penumbra’s new Digitization System, equipped with a a FUJIFILM GFX100S II. Given the fact that there are many artists archives which are at risk of being lost, this internship is an opportunity for interns to play a part in photographic preservation that is invaluable to artists’ careers as well as provide a historical record.
Interns learn directly from industry professionals in educational seminars that go over each aspect of the process including:
- Understanding & Handling of Materials (Conservator)
- Assessment & Cataloguing (Archivist)
- Digitization System- Hardware: Using Fujifilm Cameras & Fotocare Copystand (Technician)
- Digitization System- Software: Capture One (Technician)
- File Management & Metadata (Digital Imaging Specialist)
In addition to digitizing the artists projects, interns are given time and resources to advance their own practices.
This program is possible thanks to the vision and support of Fujifilm.
Our Digitization System was made possible by a 2024 Capital Grant by New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
