PENUMBRA WORKSPACE PROGRAM

The Penumbra Workspace Program benefits three US-based emerging artists with access to time, facilities, critical and technical support, and honoraria. The extension of the program ranges from six to eight weeks depending on the time requested by the selected artists. Residents are expected to use their time to pursue their own projects: researching, photographing, scanning, printing, working on an exhibition or editing a book.

Announcing the 2026 Workspace Program artists

Penumbra Foundation is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2026 Penumbra Workspace Program (A-I-R), which supports outstanding emerging artists working in the photographic arts. They are Rachel Guardiola (Rochester, NY), Avion Pearce (Valley Stream, NY), Arturo Soto (Los Angeles, CA).

The Jury also recognized Sebastian Ferruzo (Jersey City, NJ) and Misael Hernández (Springfield, OR) as Finalists.

Residents have liberal access to Penumbra’s darkrooms, digital tools, library, workshops, photo labs and shooting studios as well as technical and critical support. Each artist receives a stipend to aid them in all stages of creative activity, whether it is research and experimentation, the development of new work, completing a project already in progress, working on an exhibition, or editing a book.

The 2026 Jury was composed of Makeda Best (Ehrenkranz Chief Curator of Photography, MoMA; author, historian and educator), Natasha Chuk (Media theorist, researcher, writer, and educator), and Walead Beshty (Artist and educator).

Read below to learn more about thee residents, finalists, and jurors.

Avion Pearce

Arturo Soto

Rachel Guardiola

Finalists

Jury

Makeda Best, Ph.D., is a curator and scholar specializing in American photography. She is currently the Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA), and was recently appointed the Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz Chief Curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Prior to OMCA, Best served at as Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography and the Interim Head of the Division of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Harvard Art Museums. A contributor to numerous exhibition catalogs and scholarly journals, she is the author of Elevate the Masses: Alexander Gardner, Photography and Democracy in 19th Century America. Her exhibition catalog, Devour the Land: War and American Landscape Photography since 1970 (2022), was awarded the Photography Catalogue of the Year Award at the 2022 Paris Photo-Aperture PhotoBook Awards.

Natasha Chuk, PhD is a New York City-based media theorist, arts writer, lecturer, and independent curator engaged with the histories and philosophies of creative technologies and their entanglements with perception, aesthetics, identity, and cultural imagination. Her writing and criticism have appeared in numerous periodicals, edited volumes, and artist catalogues, and she is the author of two books: Photo Obscura: The Photographic in Post-Photography (Intellect, 2025) and Vanishing Points: Articulations of Death, Fragmentation, and the Unexperienced Experience of Created Objects (Intellect, 2015).

Walead Beshty (b. 1976, London, UK) is an artist and writer working in Los Angeles. Exhibitions of his work have been presented at Kunst Museum Winterthur, Switzerland; Musée d'art moderne et contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland; the Barbican Centre, London; Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; and Malmö Konsthall, Sweden, among many others. Beshty’s work is held in numerous museum collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tate, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Monographs on his work include Walead Beshty: Selected Correspondences 2001–2010 (Damiani, 2010), Walead Beshty: Natural Histories (JRP|Ringier, 2011/2014), and Walead Beshty: Work in Exhibition 2011–2020 (Koenig, 2020). His collected writings 33 Texts: 93,614 Words: 581,035 Characters: Selected Writings (2003–2015) was published by JRP|Ringier in 2016, and his forthcoming book, Worlds of Appearance: An Introduction to Aesthetics in Practice, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in November 2026.

About the Workspace A-I-R Program

The Penumbra Workspace Program benefits three US-based emerging artists* with access to time, facilities, critical and technical support, and honoraria. The extension of the program ranges from six to eight weeks depending on the time requested by the selected artists. Participants have liberal access to the workspace facilities. They are expected to use their time to pursue their own projects: researching, photographing, scanning, printing, working on an exhibition or editing a book.

* An emerging artist is someone in the early stage of their career, who takes risks and embraces challenges, and who hasn't yet established a solid reputation as an artist amongst other artists, curators, producers, critics, and arts administrators.