Our Teachers

Anja Hitzenberger is a photographer, filmmaker, consultant, and educator. She is the founder of StrudelmediaLive, an educational platform that offers live online photography classes and more to people around the world. Anja studied in the Creative Practice full-time program at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York City, and has been on the faculty there since 2009. She is dedicated to working with people from different cultures across the globe.

Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows, film festivals, and on theater stages throughout Europe, the United States, South America, and Asia. Her photography has been published internationally and is a part of both private and institutional collections, including the International Center of Photography. She has received numerous artistic grants and has been awarded residencies in Rome, Paris, Warsaw, Beijing, and Tainan (Taiwan). A focus of her activities has been working with live performance, including producing a multimedia piece that toured in New York City, Austria, and Korea.

Anja has been teaching live online photography classes since 2015, as well as in-person workshops in New York, Europe, China, and Taiwan. Originally from Salzburg, Austria, she divides her time between New York and Vienna.

Marco Antonio Bello is an award-winning Reuters photojournalist, based in Caracas (Venezuela) and Miami. He originally studied business and worked as an IT consultant, but the political and social changes in Venezuela after the death of President Chavez in 2013 inspired him to become a photojournalist, eventually working for Reuters in Venezuela. In 2016 he attended the ICP Masterclass “Visual Storytelling in the Digital Age” in Turin, Italy, and in 2017 he was accepted to the Eddie Adams Workshop in New York. Along with photojournalism, he also teaches photography workshops in some of the main photography schools in Venezuela.

He has received awards from Le Prix de la Photographie de Paris (2018), 75th Picture of the Year International (POYI) Award of Excellence (2018), American Photography 34 Chosen Winner (2018); NPPA’s Best of Photojournalism (2018), PDN Photo Annual (2018), International Photography Awards (2017), Honorable Mention; Latin American Fotografia 6 Winner (2017), and National Award of Journalism (2015).

Samantha Box is a Jamaican-born, Bronx-based photographer. In her studio-based practice, she uses self-portraiture, sound, and installation to articulate her personal diasporic/Caribbean experience. This work has been exhibited at the Houston Center of Photography (2019), and the Andrew Freedman House (2020). In Spring 2021, Box will join the Bronx Museum of the Arts’ AIM Fellowship program.

Her previous documentary work focused on New York City's community of LGBTQ youth of color, and was widely recognized, notably with a NYFA Fellowship (2010), and shown, most prominently, as part of the ICP Museum’s Perpetual Revolution exhibition (2017). This work is part of the permanent collections of the Open Society Foundation, EN FOCO, and Light Work.

Samantha holds a certificate in Photojournalism and Documentary Studies from the International Center of Photography (2006). She also holds an MFA in Advanced Photographic Studies from the International Center of Photographer/Bard College (2019).

Daura Campos is a visual artist and photographer based in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. In her practice, she investigates social issues through experimental photographic techniques, pushing against expectations of representation and exploring what is often left unseen. Her process allows analog film to exist as a reactive being beyond a medium of choice and aims to ignite discourse about our relationship with photography and society.

Daura has exhibited at the CICA Museum (South Korea), MK Gallery (England), Rotterdam Photo (Netherlands), Pinakothek der Moderne (Germany), Museum of Art of Pereira (Colombia), Gallery 44 (Canada), and Open Eye Gallery (England), among others. Her work has been recognized by the IPA – The International Photo Awards — with an Official Selection Prize (2024), Analog Sparks Awards with second place in the Technique category (2024), a high commendation from The JUST Art Award (2023), and others.

Elizabeth Castaldo is an artist, printmaker, and bookbinder based in Peekskill, NY and New York City. She has completed residencies at the Center for Book Arts (New York City) and Printmaker's Open Forum (Oxford, PA). Castaldo received her MFA from Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) Atlanta where she was a Dean's Fellow in Printmaking, and her BFA from the School of Visual Arts. In November 2020, her solo exhibition, Proximate Magic, was presented at Saint Joseph's College in Patchogue, NY. Her work was included in the traveling exhibition, Freed Formats: The Book Reconsidered and she organized the exchange portfolio Earth/Mother for the SGCI 2020 conference "Puertografico." She teaches printmaking and book arts at Parsons School of Design, Nassau Community College, and the Center for Book Arts. Her work is held in many private and institutional collections including SCAD, Yale University, The University of Alberta, and Carnegie Melon University.

Gianni Cipriano is a Sicilian-born independent photographer based in Napoli, Italy. His work focuses on contemporary social, political, and economic issues. Gianni regularly works for The New York Times and has been documenting the ongoing upheaval in Italian politics for L’Espresso weekly magazine since 2013. His editorial work has also appeared in Time, Wired, The Wall Street Journal, Le Monde Magazine, The Guardian Weekend Magazine, among others.

He graduated from the Documentary Photography and Photojournalism Program at the International Center of Photography in New York in 2008. He has received recognition and awards from POYI (Picture of the Year International), American Photography, New York Photo Awards, International Photography Awards, and the Ian Parry Scholarship.

Gianni’s work has been showcased in group exhibitions in venues such as the Rencontres d’Arles, FOLI Lima Biennale of Photography, MOPLA, Lumix Festival for Young Photojournalism and at the MAXXI museum in Rome.

Claudia Kaatziza Cortínez is an Argentine/Chilean/American artist and educator. She has exhibited her work, curated exhibitions, and organized educational projects in the US and Latin America for over a decade. Her studio practice combines printmaking, sculptural, and photographic techniques that depict urban and domestic architecture as sites of reflection and transformation. Central to her work is experimenting with materials such as paper pulp and light sensitive chemistry to capture imprints of spaces and objects, and how the residue of these imprints can communicate a larger socio-political narrative. Claudia is co-founder of LAZO, an art collective that brings together Latinx artists to create participatory projects and exhibitions. Claudia received her BFA from Rhodes Island School of Design (RISD) and MFA from Yale. Recent awards and residencies include the Yale Norfolk Teaching Fellowship, Silver Art Projects Residency, Rema Hort Mann Grant, Center for Book Arts Residency, Lower East Side Printshop Residency, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) Community Engagement Grant among others. She is currently an artist in residence with her collective LAZO at The Clemente in New York City.

Born in Mexico City and now living in Brooklyn, Carlos works in bookmaking, portraiture, unique chromogenic prints, poetry, and street photography. Carlos earned a BA in psychology at the Universidad Autónoma de México, before transitioning to photography and studying at different institutions in Berlin, New York City, Oaxaca, and Mexico City, where he worked as a printer and production assistant for Cristina Kahlo for over 7 years. He completed his Creative Practices certificate at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York City in 2021. His work has been exhibited at venues including Centro Fotográfico Manuel Alvarez Bravo and Centro de las Artes de San Agustín in Oaxaca, Mexico; Imago Fotokunst (Berlin); and ICP (New York City).

Lesly Deschler Canossi is a photographer, photography educator, and cultural producer. She holds an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and is a faculty member at the International Center of Photography. She has taught at Columbia University, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Lamar Dodd School of Art, Cortona, Italy.

In 2016, she and Zoraida Lopez-Diago co-created Women Picturing Revolution — an organization dedicated to female photographers who have documented conflicts, crises, and revolutions in private realms and public spaces. WPR presented for Fast Forward: Women in Photography at the Tate Modern on the topic of their forthcoming book Representations of Black Motherhood and Photography, Leuven University Press: Spring, 2021.

Deschler Canossi recently created the panel, Urgent Pictures! Photographs of Unrest Reconsidered, Focus on the Story photography festival. Her ongoing personal photographic project Domestic Negotiations explores autonomy, partnership, and the role of the mother as artist.

Jolanda Drukker Murray is a contemporary sculptor and textile artist based in Utrecht (The Netherlands). She studied art history at Leiden University and attended a program at Artibus Art School Utrecht with a focus on ceramics and bronze. She began collecting fabrics and creating wall hangings which were exhibited in several shows. She also created a “Circle of Life in 10 Kimonos” for the Kröller-Müller Museum. Jolanda specializes in “documentary embroidery”: telling stories using embroidery as well as mixed media techniques on photos and pictures from magazines. Her latest textile installation Stonehenge is a combination of photo embroidery, embroidery. and stitch work. She is currently working on Dialogue between Photography and Embroidery, an artbook in which she is embroidering on photos by the Dutch photographer Milja Markies.

Dortje Fink is an art and photography historian, educator, cultural organizer and podcaster based in Berlin. With academic training at Humboldt University in Berlin and Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, her research interests involve photographic archives, exhibition histories, lens-based media art, visual culture, biases of canonization, and decentering the history of photography. Her deep engagement with works of Carrie Mae Weems, Philip Kwame Apagya, Boris Mikhailov, Martin Chambi, Nickolas Muray, and Manfred Paul has inspired her writing, which has been published in exhibition catalogues and magazines. Since 2014, she has been working with C/O Berlin — an exhibition space dedicated to photography and visual media. She hosts, along with Julia Wolf, the German podcast "rein theoretisch – Fotografisches mit Fink&Wolf" about photographs whose visibility is restricted for a variety of reasons.

Allen Frame is a photographer and writer, based in New York and represented by Gitterman Gallery. He has released four books of photography: Whereupon (Palermo Publishing, 2023); Innamorato (Meteoro Editions, 2023); Fever, (Matte Editions, 2021); and Detour, (Kehrer, 2001). Currently, his work appears in the exhibition Mexichrome at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. His two-person exhibition Lost and Found was presented at Soft Network in New York, in November. He is a winner of the 2017/2018 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome and CEC Artslink’s Back Apartment Residency in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2019. He has curated numerous exhibitions, including Luxe, Calme, Volupte, which he co-curated with Sergio Bessa at Candice Madey Gallery in 2023. He is an Adjunct Professor of Photography at Pratt Institute (MFA) and also teaches at the School of Visual Arts (BFA), the International Center of Photography in New York, and for StrudelmediaLive.

Stefan Frank is a photographer and writer, working from Heidelberg, Germany. Way before he came to photography, he studied mathematics and philosophy at Ruhr Universität Bochum and worked as an IT specialist. He studied at Atelier Smedsby with JH Engström and Margot Wallard in Paris in 2017, before he eventually began studying photography at Ostkreuzschule, Berlin, with Peter Bialobrzeski. He graduated in 2023 with the work Irgendwo ("Anywhere"), a project dealing with politically motivated crime and the terror-spree of the far right in Germany. He has been teaching with StrudelmediaLive since 2020, giving courses on surrealism, poetics of space, gestalt theory for photographers, and more. His work has been exhibited in Heidelberg, Frankfurt, and Berlin.

Olga Ginzburg is a Belarusian-American photographer based in New York City. With an interest in open-ended narrative and its potential for subtle and layered meaning, her work explores notions of place, identity, home, community, and biculturalism. Olga graduated from the City College of New York, and her work has twice been included in the Triennial of Staten Island Photography at the Alice Austen House Museum (2019 and 2023). Since 2019, Olga’s work has appeared regularly in The New York Times and other leading news outlets and has been featured on ABC’s Eyewitness News 7 in New York City.

Helena Goñi is an artist driven by analog processes in photography and is a photobook enthusiast. Helena is from Bilbao, Spain, and is currently based in Brooklyn, where she moved in 2021 thanks to a Fulbright Scholarship to attend the International Center of Photography.
 
She holds an MFA in Photography from Central Saint Martins (London) and a BA in Fine Arts from the University of the Basque Country. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, BilbaoArte Foundation, Cité des Arts (Paris), and Koganecho AIR (Japan). Her work has been exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the International Center of Photography, 3331 Arts Chiyoda (Tokyo), PhotoMuseum Zarautz (Spain), Aldama Fabre Gallery and others. She is also the founder of Caleidoscopio, a photography educational platform for youth in the Basque Country.

Lavonne Hall is a native New Yorker and has been extremely active in the photography and film communities for more than 25 years. She is a fine art photographer, a live-streaming influencer, and a social butterfly. She teaches at the International Center of Photography and the School of Visual Arts, where she received her Masters in Digital Photography (and for whom she developed two iPad apps). She presents Lightroom demos for Adobe and Wacom, has worked with Pentax, Fuji Film, B&H, KelbyOne, and Adorama among others, and is the coordinator of the NY Photo Salon. One of her passions is getting people out and about to experience life through photography.

Marianne Holm Hansen is a Danish artist based in London. She studied at the Fynske Academy of Fine Arts (Denmark), International Center of Photography (New York), and completed an MA in Interactive Media: Critical Theory and Practice, at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has worked internationally as an editorial photographer, photography lecturer and educator, and today collaborates continuously with institutions such as Tate Modern and the Royal Institute of British Architects (London) to deliver workshops and projects that invite participants to engage critically and creatively across media and themes.

Marianne's work is shown internationally through exhibitions, publications, and live events. She has received awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (New York) and Arts Council England, amongst others, and held research and production residencies in the UK, USA, France, Finland, and Serbia. Her most recent book, Void As (A) – A Proposition, collates photographs with texts to propose a series of prompts for thinking differently about language, time and space.

Joanna Lehan is a New York-based teacher, editor, writer, and curator. She co-organized several international survey exhibitions at the International Center of Photography (ICP), including three triennial exhibitions: Strangers (2003); Ecotopia (2006), and A Different Kind of Order (2013), as well as 2017’s Perpetual Revolution. She edited monographs by Susan Meiselas, Trevor Paglen, Hank Willis Thomas, and Thomas Ruff and for Aperture Foundation, as well as several projects for the Walther Collection. She has written for Aperture magazine, Photograph, PDN, Time’s “Lightbox”, and Contact Sheet, and contributed essays to several books. She teaches Survey of Contemporary Photography at ICP-Bard and at Barnard College.

Kai McBride is a photographer, musician, teacher, and avid cyclist who recently uprooted from Brooklyn to sunny Santa Fe, New Mexico. He spent the last ten years teaching photography and managing the photo facilities at Columbia University, his alma mater, where he received an MFA in 2008.

Born on the island of Kauai in 1972, by his 18th birthday Kai had lived in California, Oregon, Mississippi, Wisconsin, Texas, Oahu, North Carolina, and Massachusetts. He sharpened his powers of observation while adjusting to life between suburban ranch-style homes, cabins with no running water, and a 20-foot teepee in the field of a commune.

His photographs have been exhibited in museum and gallery exhibitions, and are held in public and private collections. His first monograph, About Face: Picturing Tampa, was published by SPQR Editions in Fall 2016.

Martha Naranjo Sandoval is a Brooklyn-based artist, publisher, cataloguer, and bookseller from Mexico City. She holds a degree in film from Centro de Diseño, Cine y Televisión in Mexico City, and an MFA from the International Center of Photography and Bard College. She is the co-founder of the editorial project Matarile Ediciones, which publishes work by artists who are immigrants or part of a recent diaspora. She published her book Sangre de mi Sangre (edited by Justine Kurland) in 2021 and Dashwood Books published her book Como Agua para Ajolote a year later. Miriam Gallery (Brooklyn) presented The Stench of Orange Blossoms, a solo exhibition of her work, from January to March 2023.

In 2014 she won the Conacyt-FONCA scholarship (awarded by the Mexican Government) for studies abroad and in 2017 was part of the Flux Factory Artist in Residence, for which she organized the community project Día de Muertos. Along with artist-curator groana melendez, she organizes platforms to showcase artists and promote critical conversations, including a rapid-talk event with Celebrate Mexico Now and the Camera Club of New York, and the Apartment Series Issue of the Nueva Luz Magazine.

Samanta Ortega is a laboratory scientist, photographer, and art educator based in São Paulo, Brazil. Integrating the past, present, and future of the history of photographic processes, she is dedicated to exploring and sharing research on plant-based photographic developers in an experimental approach to film manipulation and studies within photochemistry. By valuing analog photography that is based on the reuse of materials and simplification of processes, she addresses accessible alternatives in spaces with different infrastructures and audiences of a wide age range and levels of knowledge. She has taught at institutions including SESC (Brazil), Pinacoteca de São Bernardo do Campo, and at analog photography festivals and independent cultural spaces focused on film photography throughout Brazil.

Néstor Pérez-Molière was born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and currently resides in The Bronx. His practice takes place mainly in the realm of photography, but also incorporates performance, drawing, video, installation, and intaglio techniques. All of these are used in unison as he turns his camera on himself and delves into self-portraiture, exploring his relationship with his body, body image ideals, and food relationships as subject matter.

Nestor has an MFA from Hunter College and holds a BSc in botany. He was part of the Artist in the Marketplace and Creative Capital’s Taller mentorship programs, and was part of The Bronx Museum of the Art’s Fourth Biennial. He has exhibited at the Museo de las Américas, the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center, Longwood Gallery, and the Liga de Artes de San Juan. He currently teaches digital and darkroom photography at the International Center of Photography and The Point CDC.

Anita Pouchard Serra is a French-Argentine photographer based in Buenos Aires and working mostly in Latin America. Her work focuses on current societal problems involving identity, migration, empowerment, and territory, with a strong transdisciplinary approach. She considers each project a laboratory to explore her photographic practice, from drawings to performance. She is a Pulitzer Center grantee and National Geographic Emergency Fund recipient (2020); a "We, Women" grantee by Women Photograph and United Photo Industries (2019); an Open Society Foundation "Moving Walls" fellow (2018); and a multiple IWMF (International Women’s Media Foundation) grantee. Her work has been published in Time, The New York Times, Le Monde, Bloomberg, Amnesty International, Days Japan, Wired, and Geo magazine among others and has exhibited her work in Argentina, France, Uruguay, Spain, and the United States. She has taught photojournalism in Argentina, France, the United States and El Salvador.

James Prochnik is a Brooklyn-based photographer who uses photography as a means to explore the world outside, focusing on people, place, memory and the poetry of the everyday. His photographs have been published in The New York Times, Vice Media, Lenscratch, USA Today, and Shots Magazine and have been exhibited in galleries around the country. In 2019, James launched NYC Photo Community — a weekly newsletter listing photography events, workshops, exhibitions, and opportunities for photographers everywhere. James has been a regular guest lecturer on ethics and aesthetics in street photography at the University of Vermont.

Zuzana Pustaiová's interest in visual arts began with painting but soon switched to photography, which she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava (Slovakia) where she completed her Ph.D in 2022. Her artwork uses role-playing as a principal tool to explore and reveal the relationships between family members, relatives, friends, and other social groups. With a sense of wit, humor and irony, she uncovers the cultural stereotypes related to gender, age, tradition, and social inclusion. In 2022, her book One Day Every Day was shortlisted for the Paris Photo – Aperture Photobook Award. She has received numerous awards in contemporary photography — including the Grand Prix at the Rovinj Photodays 2021 and Finalist for the 2017 Lucie Foundation Scholarship in Los Angeles. In 2018 she was named Slovak Photographer of the Year. She has exhibited internationally in Europe and Canada and lives and works in Levice and Bratislava.

Edward Ratliff is a multi-disciplinary artist and educator. In the visual realm, he’s a graphic designer who works in print and digital media with clients ranging from individual artists to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His film, video, and installation work has been exhibited internationally.

As a composer and multi-instrumentalist, he’s led bands in clubs, theaters, and festivals across New York City and in Europe and Asia, and has received numerous commissions and grants for dance and theater scores. His music has been heard in shows on Netflix, HBO, Nickelodeon, Hulu, PBS, and more — everything from a biography of Dostoyevsky to Real Sex Xtra. He “is best known for making richly cinematic music that captures New York City’s momentum and diversity” (The Wall Street Journal) and has been called “a wonderfully spunky and imperturbable trumpet player” (The New York Times).

Scott Rossi is a photographer based in New York who is originally from Canada. His work captures the poetic nuances of daily life and the complex relationship between people and their environment. Rossi is a Documentary Practices and Visual Journalism program graduate from the International Center of Photography (ICP) and holds a BA in Psychology from the University of Victoria. Following his move to New York City in 2020, he began his project, Common Place, a visual meditation on Central Park, resulting in his first monograph. His work has been featured in or commissioned by The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Vogue, and the British Journal of Photography, among others. He has exhibited internationally at the Rotterdam Photo Festival, The International Center of Photography, and Photo 2022 in Melbourne.

Chloe Scout Nix is an artist and performer from Waxahachie, Texas, currently living in Brooklyn. She graduated with her MFA in photography from Pratt Institute and received her BFA in visual arts, with a minor in art history, from Southern Methodist University. Her conceptual work focuses on acts of performative intimacy using various modes of performing for the camera that often result in self portraiture. She received the Dallas Museum of Art’s Clare Hart DeGolyer Memorial Fund award in 2019, and the Standard Club Award that Makes a Difference in 2018. Her 2024 thesis exhibition, sorry for the mess, curated by Jody Graf, was displayed at the Pratt Photography Gallery in Brooklyn, with a selection of images also exhibited at Clamp gallery in Chelsea (NYC) as part of the group show Everything is Something, curated by Allen Frame.

Kat Shannon is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, and educator working in photography, text, and video, currently based between São Paulo, Brazil, and Orlando, Florida. Her work examines notions of intimacy, human connection, gender, community, and culture. She holds degrees in photography from Savannah College of Art and Design (BFA) as well as Bard College (MFA).

Kat has held teaching positions at Yeshiva University, Brookdale College, Stetson University, Middlesex College, and ICP, and previously worked for three years as the head curator at an art consultancy in New York. In 2017 Kat co-founded the collaborative artist collective Memory Foam through which she curates exhibitions, publishes and collects artists' books and zines, and produces an artist interview series called "Artists Eat Ice Cream."

Marina Thomé is a photographer and documentary filmmaker based in Portugal and Brazil. Marina works as a director, researcher, and editor for multimedia platforms and experiments with portraits, archives, and soundscapes. Her films have been presented in festivals in France, USA, Portugal, Spain, Germany, Colombia, and elsewhere, including the Margaret Mead Film Festival in New York and Festival Biarritz Latin America in France. She is the co-founder of Estúdio CRUA, an award-winning production company that connects new media and social impact. They produced the Hackathon Webdoc Project, involving over 100 participants in workshops on creating collaborative multi-platform documentaries. Marina holds masters degrees in Creative Documentary (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) and in Communication, Art & Technology (Centro Universitário Belas Artes de São Paulo). She studied photojournalism and storytelling at the International Center of Photography (New York) and has taught multiplatform storytelling at art institutions in Brazil, Portugal, and Spain.

In 2023, she coordinated Arché, a creative development space for film professionals from Iberoamerican countries, at the Doclisboa and Porto/Post/Doc Festivals, organized by APORDOC-The Portuguese Documentary Association. She's currently working on her project Red Skies, a video installation supported by DG Arts (Portuguese Directorate-General for the Arts), to be presented in the Azores Islands.

Bryan Whitney is a photographer and artist in New York City whose work often involves experimental imaging techniques, such as x-rays, 3D imagery, virtual reality, and other alternative processes. Whitney holds an MFA in Photography from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and a BA in the Psychology of Art from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has taught photography at Rutgers University and currently teaches at the International  Center of Photography in New York City. A recipient of a Fulbright Grant for lectures on American Photography in Eastern Europe, he has exhibited across the United States and internationally. He has  traveled the globe for special projects, including archeological expeditions in Sudan and in the Republic of Georgia. His work has appeared in magazines such as Harpers Bazaar, Fortune, the New York Times, and in books, posters and advertising campaigns worldwide.