Portfolio Throwdown

Photography Gathering and Portfolio ThrowDown  February 7th-8th

 

SOLD OUT!

Portfolio reviews are sold out! We can continue taking your registrations, however, you will be on a waiting list in case someone drops out!

Deadline for Registration is January 22nd. 

Registration is on first-come-first-served bases! We will do our best to schedule you with your desired reviewers. Portfolio reviews for students will be $10.50 for five 20-minute reviews. The entry fees will go toward portfolio awards, selected by the reviewers.

Reviewer Bios and Registration Form are at the bottom of the page.

Registration is not completed without registration payment. Registrations are based on first come, first served basis- in order in which we receive the registration fees, paid through Square. You will receive the Square invoice link after you complete your reviewer selection. Please make the payment as soon as convenient after receiving your invoice. 

Schedule of Events:

All of events will be on East Carolina University Campus and near-by.

Map of eateries in downtown Greenville  

 

Friday, February 7th:         

Evening: Informal Gathering and Kick off (Location TBD)

First Friday ArtWalk in Downtown Greenville 

 

Saturday, February 8th:         

9AM-11:30AM: Informal Portfolio Sharing, Workshops, Exhibitions, and Tours of the School of Art and Design (Jenkins Fine Art Center):       

Workshop:

Darkroom printing with your cell phone!

Learn how to use your cell phone in lieu of negatives to make gelatin silver prints in the darkroom. All materials will be provided. Participants will need a working cell phone (cracked screens are welcome). To secure your spot, please email Angela Wells wellsa@ecu.edu

 

11:30AM-12:30PM: Lunch

12:30PM to 6:25PM: Lectures and Presentations will run concurrently with portfolio reviews in adjoining room (Jenkins Fine Art Center).

Portfolio Reviews (Jenkins Fine Art Center)

Lectures and Presentations  (Speight Auditorium):

12:30PM   Addison Brown and Greg Banks

1:00PM   Ann Kaplan

1:25PM   Courtney Johnson

1:50PM   Tony Jackson

2:15PM   Michael Gaines

2:40PM   Joseph Rafferty III: Artists and Americans

3:05PM

3:30PM   Coffee Break

3:55PM

4:20PM   Bekah Alviani: Lifts & Loss: Processing Grief with Polaroid Lifts

4:45PM   Erika Céspedes: Reworking your photography in the era of technology

5:10PM   Heather Evans Smith

5:35PM   Jamie Robertson: The Unseen: Infrared Photography and the Swamp

6:00PM   Jennifer Mace

 

6:30PM:

Social Time

 

Accommodations 

Holiday Inn (2 miles to ECU)

We have a block of 10 rooms for $129 plus tax per night at Holiday Inn,  203 Greenville Blvd SW for ECU Photography- Please use BookingLink when registering.

Guestrooms will be held in the block until 1/7/2025. Booking includes:

  • Free high-speed and Wireless Internet access in the lobby and all guestrooms, allowing your guests to easily stay connected to their customers and family while at our hotel.
  • Complimentary parking
  • Complimentary indoor pool & Spa 6am to 11pm
  • 24-hour fitness center

 

AirBnBs in town– Good for larger shared groups: Link

Other hotels in Greenville: Link

And for those of you who are not opposed to Camping, River Park North is a nice location:

https://www.greenvillenc.gov/government/recreation-parks/river-park-north

 

Portfolio Reviewers

 

Bekah Alviani is a published, award-winning, and internationally exhibited lens-based artist whose work explores the relationship between images, objects, and memory – offering diverse perspectives of the subjects she documents. She has been published in Photographer’s Forum Best of Photography 2015, The Remake Project, and various other publications. Her work has recently been seen in solo exhibitions in Texas, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. 

Alviani holds an AST in Photography, a BFA in Graphic Design with minors in Art History and Marketing, and an MFA in Digital Arts. Alviani is also a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer having served in Ghana, West Africa. She served as an art teacher in a Ghanaian school for the Deaf. Her service fostered a love of teaching, and she now works as an Assistant Professor of Art at Brevard College teaching digital art and photography while continuing her visual research and art-making practice. 

 

Greg Banks is a photo-based artist and instructor at Appalachian State University. He received his MFA in photography at East Carolina University in May 2017.  He received a B.A. in photography and a B.A. in fine art from Virginia Intermont College in 1998. Banks is a top 200 finalist in Photo Lucida’s Critical Mass in 2018. He was one of only seven artists chosen for the Light Factory’s Annuale 9 in 2017. Greg’s work was among the top 5 most popular, on the online magazine “Don’t Take Pictures” in 2017.  Greg combines everything from IPhone images to historic 19th century processes, gelatin silver printing, painting and digital printing. His current creative practice investigates family, folklore, memories, magic, Appalachia, as well as history and religion.

 

Shane Booth grew up in central Nebraska where he would spend hours looking at family photos with this grandmother, sparking his love for photography.  He graduated with a BA in art from Nebraska Wesleyan University and an MFA in photography from the Savanna College of Art and Design.  Currently he is a Full Professor of photography at Fayetteville State University. His diverse body of work has taken him all over the world where he has taught workshops and exhibited work in Sweden, Africa, Taiwan, and most recently Russia.   He received a grant to  work with HIV positive orphans in Ethiopia with Artists for Charity, and was awarded a another grant by the US Embassy in Moscow to work with the LGBTQ and HIV positive people in Russia.  He has many honors including being nominated for Sweden’s favorite TV star by QX magazine for his stint on the wildly popular reality tv show Allt for Sverige, tackling the subject of being HIV positive.  It was his time on this show that took him back to his roots and he began photographing Nebraska and its people.  He also photographed Laura Bush for The National Willa Cather Foundation.   His camera of choice is an antique studio camera from 1867 which he found in a junk shop in Alma NE that he has converted to shoot 8×10 film. 

 

Addison Brown is a photography-based artist currently living in Boone, North Carolina. He received his BA in photography at the University of Alabama Huntsville in 2012 and a MFA in photography at East Carolina University in 2017.

 

Erika Céspedes is a Costa Rican born commercial and fine art photographer. Her fine art focuses on narrative life events in natural settings and her commercial focuses on food photography and advertising. Current courses include Traditional, Experimental, Digital photography, Design Fundamentals and Post-Editing. Her fine artwork has been displayed in galleries and museums nationwide. She believes students from all cultural backgrounds and socio-economic status deserve art in their life as a form of expression and personal growth.

 

Dr. Tim Christensen grew up under the big skies of the West looking at the ground. A passionate interest in living things compelled him to get his Ph.D. in Genetics from Cornell and become a biology professor at East Carolina University. His well-practiced attention to the small and unnoticed bits of nature fills his walks through North Carolina. While completing his MFA at ECU he explored historical methods including: Cyanotype, Gum Bichromate, Van Dyke, and wet plate collodion. Tim has also pushed the boundaries of digital photography with his precision work in astrophotography and the creation of micro-panoramas.

 

Brian Culbertson is originally from Chesapeake, Virginia, currently residing in Greenville, North Carolina, where he is an instructor at East Carolina University. Brian has exhibited work internationally participating in exhibitions across the United States, Canada, China, and the United Arab Emirates. His work has been featured in publications such as The Hand Magazine, Don’t Take Pictures, Light Leaked, and Fraction Magazine. Brian creates images that investigate photography’s influence on cultural and social values.

 

Heather Evans Smith is a photo-based artist whose work reflects her southern roots, motherhood, womanhood and a whimsical imagination she relied on as an only child in a rural town. Her photographic imagery explores the ideas of memory, loss and family in conceptual settings. Smith’s work has been exhibited in both solo and group exhibitions at venues including the Fox Talbot Museum in Lacock, England, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, NC and Leica Galerie Milano in Milan, Italy. She is a Critical Mass 2014, 2018 and 2021 Top 50 recipient, 2022 Silver List artist and the CENTER 2022 Me&Eve grant recipient. Her first monograph, Seen Not Heard, was published by Flash Powder Projects in 2016 followed by two self-published monographs, Alterations and Blue.

Heather is most interested in reviewing fine art and conceptual photography but is open to viewing all types of work. She welcomes the opportunity to offer feedback on ongoing projects and assist with planning the next steps for projects or series that are still in the conceptual stage.

 

Rod Fincannon in Greenville NC, Roderick has been working in photography and photography education for over a 13 years. Rod’s work has been published and exhibited throughout the United States.

 

Michael Gaines is a photo-based artist and bookmaker residing in Boone, North Carolina. He received his BFA in Studio Art from Appalachian State in 2021 and his MFA in Photography from East Carolina in May 2024. Before moving to North Carolina, he spent 12 years in Philadelphia where his work was focused on exploring the intersections of urban life with industrial and civic decay. Over the past few years, his work has shifted towards an examination of the self and personal identity, exploring the concept of the personal myth and acts of code switching and masking, and their effects on the queer identity. He is currently an adjunct professor at Appalachian State University and Catawba Valley Community College.

 

Makenzie Goodman is a research-based artist living between North Carolina and Texas. She works in photography, video, and installation to question belief systems associated with specific geographic places and often creates in collaboration with other artists and within communities. Her work considers the histories, narratives, and myths of a region to explore the way humans interpret and interact with the spaces they inhabit, and what that often anthropocentric relationship means for the land. Her work has been exhibited at national and international venues, most recently at Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Los Angeles), Turchin Center for the Visual Arts (Boone, NC), and Companion (Indianapolis, IN). Recent residencies and fellowships include Stove Works (Chattanooga, TN), Plyspace (Muncie, IN), and Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency (Joshua Tree, CA). Goodman is currently an Assistant Professor of Photography at Appalachian State University.

 

Tony J. Jackson. As a visual artist, educator, and veteran, my work bridges art and science, exploring where creativity meets inquiry. My art has been showcased worldwide, notably in Japan, Germany, and the UK. In my practice, I delve into the unseen and overlooked, drawing inspiration from nature’s intricate patterns, the elegance of mathematical forms, and the dynamics of human interaction. For me, art is an expression and a tool for education and transformation. I aim to create works that invite viewers to look deeper, think critically, and engage more fully with the world around them

 

Courtney Johnson specializes in alternative process and experimental photography and is one of the leading scholars on the photographic cliché-verre technique. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions in New York, Miami, San Francisco, Richmond, Colombia, and Germany and is in numerous permanent collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; University of Central Florida; Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale; and FOTOMUSEO, Bogotá. Johnson earned her BFA from New York University and her MFA from the University of Miami. She is currently an Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington

 

David Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Photography at Coastal Carolina University. Johnson’s work has settled at the intersection of society, architecture, and the individual. Multiple bodies of work demonstrate ways in which space can affect personality and how individuals impact the environments they occupy, even momentarily. In 2019, Johnson’s first book, Wig Heavier Than a Boot, a collaborative project with poet Philip Matthews, was published by Kris Graves Projects; the following year, the project was featured at the Fotofest Biennial in Houston. In 2021, the University of Texas Press published Johnson’s second book, It Can Be This Way Always: Images from the Kerrville Folk Festival. His photographs have been exhibited internationally in venues including the Contemporary Art Museum in Saint Louis, the National Building Museum in Washington D.C., Rathaus in Stuttgart, Germany, Blue Star Contemporary in San Antonio, and most recently at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, Massachusetts.

 

Ann Kaplan wonders about, makes, and writes about photography. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Institut für Politikwissenschaft, Universität Münster, Munster, Germany; Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK; and CICA, Seoul, South Korea. She is also currently working on the final throes of her first book on the contemporary photographic portrait and its connection to the possibility of human rights writ large, which is also her “nearly defensible” PhD dissertation with the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. She currently serves as associate professor at Appalachian State University and taught previously at Elon University and Philippines Women’s University in Manila. Kaplan earned her MFA at Clemson University, MA at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and BA in anthropology and sociology (with a focus on visual culture) at the University of Mary Washington.

 

Jennifer Mace is a graduate of Colorado State University with a BFA in Photography, and James Madison University with a MFA in Photography.  For the past 16 years, she has been teaching photography at Cape Fear Community College in Wilmington NC.

Artist Statement: Born in Guam, and living in Japan as a young child, Jennifer spent her formulative years learning to notice the world around her.

“Urban spaces have been a subject matter that I have gravitated towards for a while. I’m interested in documenting everyday order so I can make sense of the places I frequent.“

 

Julie Snyder Mixon is an Associate Professor of Photography at Francis Marion University in Florence, South Carolina. Julie teaches a variety of photography courses at FMU that include topics such as darkroom, experimental, digital, photographic lighting and advanced photography. She received her MFA in Photography from East Carolina University and a BFA in Photography from Barton College. She specializes in alternative photographic processes and explores the combination of analog and digital photographic processes. Julie has exhibited her work regionally, nationally and internationally.

 

Rebecca Nolan, Professor, Graduate Program Coordinator, Savannah College of Art and Design. Rebecca Nolan received a BA from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and an MFA from the University of Oregon, Eugene. She is excited to see all types of work.

 

Jamie Robertson is a visual artist and educator who works in photography and video. Her creative practice investigates the landscape of the American South as a living archive of Black life, engaging the land physically and spiritually as a primary witness to Black resistance, solace, and power.

Both private and public collections hold her work, which she has exhibited at galleries and museums across the United States. Her work was recently featured in the 2024 Texas Biennial. She earned an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Houston and an MSc in Art Therapy from Florida State University. She is an Assistant Professor at Old Dominion University.

 

Anderson Wrangle is an Associate Professor at Clemson, where he has taught Photography since 2007.  He received his B.A. in English, and Studio Art from the University of the South, and earned his M.F.A from the University of Houston in 2001, and he was a Visiting Assistant Professor there from 2003 to 2007.  Anderson Wrangle was a 2019 Hambidge Center Resident.  He was named a 2021-2023 Creativity Professor in the College of Architecture, Arts and Humanities, and has many research grants funding work in the Savannah River Basin, the Outer Banks, The ACE Basin, and other projects. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro/Coleção Joaquim Paiva, the Galerie hlavního města Prahy, Prague, and private collections

 

Angela Franks Wells is a photography-based artist specializing in 19th century photographic processes. As an educator, she is committed to facilitating creative thinking and skilled making with her students. Her recent creative endeavors are about playful investigation and finding levity. Angela is an Associate Professor of Photography at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC. where she enjoys the lush greenery of the south, proper weather storms, and the benefits of natural humidity in the studio.

Portfolio reviews are sold out! We can continue taking your registrations, however, you will be on a waiting list in case someone drops out!

If you’re interessted in being added to the waiting list, please contact me directly at KarikoD@ecu.edu

You will not be charged until we can schedule your reviews.