Shannon Crider
Shannon Crider is a visual artist and art administrator based in Houston, TX. Crider earned her MFA in Printmedia from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In addition to her artistic practice, Crider serves as the Education Director at Houston Center for Photography.
Max Fields
Max Fields is the Associate Curator and Director of Publishing at FotoFest. He has presented numerous exhibitions and has written for and overseen the production of multiple museum and gallery publications. Fields’ exhibitions and projects have been reviewed in publications including Frieze, ArtForum, Art in America, and Aperture, among others. Recent projects include Public Life: Distance and Diaspora (2020), African Cosmologies: Photography, Time, and the Other (with Mark Sealy, 2020), Gareth Long: Kidnappers Foil (2019-20), and The Color of Love with Julia Brown, Skylar Fein, and Peggy Ahwesh (2018). His upcoming exhibitions include Public Life: Recording the Blur (2021) with Francis Almendárez and Kara Springer, among others; In Place of An Index (2021), co-curated with Ryan Dennis and Evan Garza; and the 2022 FotoFest Biennial, co-curated with Steven Evans and a soon-to-be-announced guest.
Jaelyn Lyles
Jaelyn Lyles is a writer from the Greater Houston area. She loves the outdoors, spending time with family and friends, and is always planning her next adventure. In addition to her work as a writer, Lyles serves as the Marketing and Sales Coordinator at Houston Center for Photography.
Oli Rodriguez
Oli Rodriguez is an interdisciplinary artist working in video, photography, performance, installation, and writing. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor in the Art Department (Photography) at California State University, Los Angeles. His intersectional research and interdisciplinary projects conceptually focus on queerness, notions of passing, visualizing the performativity of gender, explorations in appropriation, performative interactions with the public as a collaborator, visualizing other representations of the AIDS pandemic while referencing historical movements in gender, racial and feminist histories. He curated the exhibition, The Great Refusal: Taking on New Queer Aesthetics, at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). He is a part of the monograph Confronting the Abject, named from the research-themed class that he co-taught with Catherine Opie at SAIC. Papi, his forthcoming publication, archives the AIDS pandemic through his queer family in Chicago during the 1980s. He also just finished his short documentary film, LYNDALE, exploring toxic masculinity, cyclical familial trauma, and queerness. LYNDALE is currently distributed by Video Data Bank (VDB). Rodriguez has screened, performed, lectured, and exhibited his works internationally and nationally.
Valentine Umansky
As a curator, author, and critic, Valentine Umansky has worked for various institutions dedicated to visual arts and is currently acting as Curator, International Art at Tate Modern. In 2015, after collaborating with the Rencontres d’Arles festival, she published Duane Michals, Storyteller (Filigranes), right before relocating to the U.S. She has since written for various art magazines, including Aperture and FOAM, and curated solo exhibitions of Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum and Saya Woolfalk, as well as the group exhibition, Confinement. Politics of Space and Bodies. She co-curated the LagosPhoto Festival in 2018 and the 2020 FotoFocus Biennial as well as a survey of modern and contemporary Nigerian art, Layers, with Iheanyi Onwuegbucha.
Efrem Zelony-Mindell
Efrem Zelony-Mindell is a white non-binary curator, writer, and artist. Some of their curatorial endeavors include group shows, n e w f l e s h, Are You Loathsome, and This Is Not Here. They have written about art for FOAM, Unseen, DEAR DAVE, and Rocket Science, as well as essays for artists’ monographs. Their first book n e w f l e s h (Gnomic Book), which was shortlisted for the Paris Photo Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Award 2020, is now available and in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate, The Art Institute of Chicago, and 42 other libraries and archives around the world. Zelony-Mindell’s second book, Primal Sight (Gnomic Book), a survey of contemporary black-and-white photography including the work of 146 international artists, is also available now. They work, write, lecture, and live in New York.
