Leslie Moody Castro
Leslie Moody Castro is an independent curator and writer who lives and works in both Mexico City and Austin.
Leigh Gleason
Leigh Gleason is the Director of Collections at UCR ARTS, where she oversees the permanent collections of the California Museum of Photography and Sweeney Art Gallery. Gleason holds a PhD in visual history from the Photographic History Research Centre at De Montfort University (Leicester, UK), an MLIS from San Jose State University, an MA in art history from UC Riverside. She has curated exhibitions on a wide variety of photographic topics, most recently “Color Shift,” tracing the history of color photography within the California Museum of Photography’s collections.
Thomas R. Kennedy
Thomas R. Kennedy is the former Executive Director of American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP), having served for five and half years in this capacity before retiring on July 3, 2020. In this capacity, he led this country’s leading trade association representing independent commercial photographers working across commercial and editorial genres for publication in all forms of media.
He is an internationally known visual journalist with extensive print, broadcast, and online journalism experience, including positions as Managing Editor/Digital News for PBS NewsHour, Managing Editor for Multimedia at The Washington Post, Director of Photography at the National Geographic Society, and Deputy Graphics Director at The Philadelphia Inquirer.
He has created, directed, and edited visual journalism projects that have earned Pulitzer Prizes, as well as EMMY, Peabody, and Edward R. Murrow awards.
Previously, he has also worked as an independent consultant coaching and mentoring individual photographers, focusing particularly on multimedia story development. In addition, he has worked providing strategic analysis on visual storytelling for media companies and nonprofit organizations, as well as teaching regularly at universities and multimedia conferences, and advising about recruiting, coaching, and managing creative talent for optimal performance.
Margaret Olin
Margaret Olin is Senior Research Scholar at Yale University. Among her publications on Photography are Touching Photographs (University of Chicago, 2012), and Photography and Imagination (Routledge, 2019). With Steven Fine and Maya Balakirsky-Katz, she coedits Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture. She is also a photographer whose work has been internationally exhibited.
Roula Seikaly
Roula Seikaly is a writer and curator based in Berkeley, CA, and Senior Editor/Curatorial Co-Director at Humble Arts Foundation.
Ali Shrago-Spechler
Ali Shrago-Spechler has worked with The New Shul as an educator, designer and community organizer since 2017. She is the recipient of the 2017 Naomi Anolic Emerging Artist Award and has participated in residencies at Mass MoCA, Art Kibbutz NY, Vermont Studio Center, Trestle Artist Space in Brooklyn and is currently an artist and teacher in residence with ProjectArt at the Crown Heights Library. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and was recently awarded a Fulbright Research Grant (‘20-’21) to pursue her project “Reclaiming Remembrance, Ritual and Place through Participatory Action” in Karlsruhe, Germany.
Ali has shown her work in various locations in both NYC and South Florida including solo exhibitions at Hadas Gallery, The Wick (f/k/a Space Heater Gallery), Spring/Break Art Fair and group exhibitions at Girls Club, Art & Culture Center of Hollywood, Purvis Young Studio, The Hole, La MaMa Theatre, Dixon Place, BravinLee Gallery and Ethan Cohen KuBe. Ali is also the founder of A Whole New Megillah, a situation-specific, performative, and interactive event that annually co-opts the Jewish holiday of Purim. Her work has been featured in the NY Times, Time Out NY, VICE, The Forward, New Times Broward, The Miami Herald and ArtNet News.
Hugo Teixeira
Hugo Teixeira grew up in the Luso-American community in San Jose, California. A linguist by training, he studied photography at San Jose State University and Lisbon’s Escola Técnica de Imagem e Comunicação and graduated from the MFA in Photography and Related Media program at Rochester Institute of Technology in 2020. His artwork relies on photography, common materials, advanced technical skillsets, and memory to create contemporary conceptual images and sculptures. As an artist and teacher, Hugo has exhibited work in the United States, Portugal, and the Macau Special Administrative Region of China.
Kelly Webeck
Kelly Lee Webeck is a photographer and visual arts educator based between Houston and Berlin. She received her BFA in visual art studies from the University of Texas at Austin and her MFA in photography from Indiana University, Bloomington. Her photographic research is about Holocaust history, memory, and education. During her graduate studies, she lived in Germany and researched Holocaust landscapes and memorial sites. She has shown her artistic works around the country, including a solo exhibition at Holocaust Museum Houston. She was a 2020-2021 semi-finalist for a Fulbright research grant to return to Germany.
