Photography & Integrated Media

Christopher James is an internationally known artist and photographer whose photographs, paintings, and alternative process images have been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world. His work has been published and shown extensively, including exhibitions in The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The George Eastman House, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The first two editions of his book, The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes (Delmar Cengage – Albany, NY), received international critical acclaim and are universally recognized by artists, curators, historians, and educators as the definitive texts in the genre of alternative process photography and photographically integrated media and culture. After 13 years at Harvard University, Christopher is presently University Professor, and Director of the MFA in Photography program here at the College of Art and. He is also a painter, graphic designer, and a professional scuba diver.

For over 20 years Dan Estabrook has created contemporary art using a variety of 19^th century photographic techniques. Recently he has focused on the earliest paper photographs – calotype negatives and salted paper prints – as sources for hand manipulation with paint and pencil. He balances his interests in photography with forays into sculpture, painting, drawing, and other works on paper. 

Dan has exhibited widely and has received several awards, including an Artist’s Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1994. He is also the subject of a recent documentary by Anthropy Arts. He is represented by the Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago, Daniel Cooney Fine Art in New York and Jackson Fine Art in Atlanta. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Ziad’s body of work as a director, producer and writer has earned over forty awards and honors. Presently Ziad is producing the film The Sharpest Edge of Nature. Ziad served as an executive producer on Forbidden Womanhood which is currently in its post-production stage. Most recently Ziad produced The Island Of Forgiveness starring Claudia Cardinale. Both films are slotted for release in 2021. Prior work includes producing The Flower of Aleppo starring Hend Sabry and executive producing Dreams I Never Had starring Malcolm McDowell. The Flower Of Aleppo was honored as Tunisia’s entry into both the 2017 Academy Awards and Golden Globe Awards. The Flower was chosen to be the opening night event at the prestigious Carthage Film Festival. His critically acclaimed feature film Shadow Glories has been heralded as “Powerful and distinctive. A mature, accomplished work...strong, stylish and uncompromising” by Kevin Thomas, film critic for The Los Angeles Times. In July, 2019, Ziad had the release of Hail Mary (Sushi Tushi), his animated and live-action football comedy.

Currently in development is Ziad's feature film Willow based on Christine Handy's best selling book Walk Beside Me. Stylistically, Willow is a magnificent story where poetic realism marries the the harsh dark layers of life. A rose standing in the center of the violent storm, tossed in so many directions with no shelter. A clearly focused journey that sparks with fresh and honest look at the struggles that face our character in her darkest moments. An accomplished original, and brilliant structure that breaks through the common chains and expectations of a melodramatic story and elevates it with gracefulness. The poetic nature that embodies the style of writing will allow a dazzling display of rawness and courage. Lightness that disguises the truth and the darkness that reveals it. Silence that conquered the greatest noise, the audience will feel the power of this emotionally charged journey.

In Hollywood, Ziad created two extraordinary theaters: The Open Fist Theatre Company and The Egyptian Arena. As Artistic Director of the award-winning Open Fist Theatre, Ziad brought to the LA theatre community prestigious international playwrights such as Arrabel, Artue, Beckett, Brecht, Churchill, Gretzky, and Lorca. He directed and produced over sixty major stage productions, among them Roxy Ventola’s After The Bomb, Brecht’s Baal, Sam Shephard’s True West, Arrabel’s Car Cemetery, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears Of Petra Von Kant, Tennessee Williams’ Vieux Carre, Nicholas Kazan’s Blood Moon, Poor Murderer, The Architect And Empress Of Assyria, Cinders, Low Level Panic, and Dusa, Fish, Stas, and Vi. Ziad has mentored and empowered numerous artists such as Burr Steers (Charlie St. Cloud, 17 Again, Igby Goes Down), Tony Spiridakis (The Last Word, Queens Logic), Dalene Young (Cross Creek, Pale Rider Pale Horse, Little Darlings), and Juan Carlos Valdivia (Southern District, Juno and the Pink Whale, American Visa). They found a haven for their creative powers when joining Ziad at The Open Fist Theatre.

Professor Ziad teaches advanced and graduate classes in filmmaking and photography at Lesley University. He earned an MFA in Directing from California State University, Fullerton, an MA in Writing and Criticism from California State University, Los Angeles, and a BA in Theatre from the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Ziad is a member of the Producer's Guild of America serving on the diversity committee.

David Hilliard exhibits his photographs both nationally and internationally and has won numerous awards such as the Fulbright and Guggenheim. His photographs can be found in many important collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

His work is represented by the Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York, Carroll and Sons Gallery in Boston, Jackson Fine Art in Atlanta, The Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown, MA and in Paris at La Galerie Particuliere. In 2005 a collection of his photographs was published in a monograph by Aperture Press. His newest monograph, What Could Be, was released by Minor Matters Books in 2014. In 2017 David received a fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council for outstanding work (his project with his father titled “Sans Means Without”).

Deb Todd Wheeler is a Boston based media artist who produces installations, photographs, and sculptural objects that explore the aesthetic impact of human productivity, the clash between the desire to be productive, to be industrious, to push technology forward, and the fraught consequences this desire reaps. From power generating interactive installations to cataloging prints of plastic as a possible new species of marine life, to working with live Western Harvester Ants where, as Ann Wilson Lloyd wrote in Art in America, “ants are perfect collaborators for Deb Todd Wheeler, as their industry is a micro-complement to her own intensive, finely wrought crafting, and her ongoing interest in science and nature”.

Awards include a LEF Contemporary Work Fund Artist grant in Inter-media, Massachusetts Cultural Council Grants in Sculpture and Installation, as well as Photography, the New England Journal of Aesthetic Research, Artist Resource Trust, and a collaborative project grant from Artists in Context.

Joseph R. Wolin is a critic and curator of contemporary art based in New York. He teaches in the MFA Photography program at Parsons School of Design, The New School. He taught in the MFA program at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from 2003 to 2015, and has also taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, Mass Art, Drew University, and Fordham University. He has served on end-of-semester juries in the MFA Photography program at Lesley University since 2012. He is the author of more than 170 art exhibition reviews for Time Out New York since 2006, and has also written for The New Yorker, Canadian Art, and Modern Painters. He has curated more than 25 exhibitions since 1994, including The Royal Art Lodge: Ask the Dust, which traveled to six venues in four countries, and Open This End: Contemporary Art from the Collection of Blake Byrne, which is currently traveling to four American university art galleries. He was the Art Critic in Residence at the Bronx Museum in 2012 – 13, and since 2002 has served as a founding board member of Participant, Inc., in New York.