Announcing | 2020 JGS Fellowship for Photography Recipients

The JGS Fellowship for Photography is a $7,000 cash grant open to New York State photography artists living and working outside of New York City.

The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) has announced Zana Briski, Widline Cadet, Ahndraya Parlato, Joshua Rashaad McFadden, and Jeannette Rodríguez Píneda as the recipients of the JGS Fellowship for Photography, a $7,000 unrestricted cash grant open to New York State photography artists living and working outside of New York City. The support for this funding is provided by Joy of Giving Something (JGS), a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the photographic arts.

Zana Briski (Margaretville, NY) is a London-born Academy Award-winning director and artist whose deepest love is the earth and its creatures. She has traveled to over 80 countries, including India where she spent 10 years photographing, filming, and teaching photography to the adult children of prostitutes in the brothels of Calcutta. Her resulting film, Born Into Brothels, won an Academy Award, an Emmy Award, and received numerous other accolades. Her current project, Reverence, is a traveling exhibit that brings viewers face-to-face with insects as individual sentient beings.

Widline Cadet (Syracuse, NY) is a Haitian-born artist whose practice draws from personal history and examines race, memory, erasure, migration, immigration, and Haitian cultural identity from within the United States. She uses photography, video, and installations to construct a visual language that explores notions of visibility and hyper visibility, black feminine interiority, and selfhood.

Ahndraya Parlato (Rochester, NY) is a Hawaiian-born photographer whose most recent project, Who Is Dead and Who Is Changed, is forthcoming from Mack Books in 2021. She’s also authored East of the Sun, West of the Moon with Gregory Halpern (Études Books, 2014) and A Spectacle and Nothing Strange (Kehrer Verlag, 2016). She was previously recognized with a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Photography, a Magenta Foundation Emerging Photographer Award, and a Light Work Grant. Parlato was also a nominee for the ICP Infinity Award, the Paul Huf Award from the FOAM Museum in Amsterdam and the SECCA Award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Joshua Rashaad McFadden (Rochester, NY) is a visual artist and assistant professor of photography at Rochester Institute of Technology in his hometown of Rochester, NY. His work primarily explores African American male identity, masculinity, notions of the father figure, and the photographic archive. His practice provides a frame of reference that articulates the many personalities of Black men. McFadden also focuses his lens on social justice issues such as police brutality and has documented protests across the United States. He was named one of the top emerging talents in the world by LensCulture and was recognized with the first place International Photography Award (IPA) for “After Selma,” a series that conveys McFadden’s response to numerous recent incidents of police brutality, among other accolades.

Jeannette Rodríguez Píneda (Kingston, NY) is a Dominican-American mixed media artist who uses antiquarian emulsion-based photographic processes as a means of questioning faded intergenerational narratives. Her work explores the act of remembering soils called home, choosing to understand the gaze of the present as the past. She teaches radical printed matter and time-based media for many intergenerational arts programs including Groundswell, Queens Museum, Recess, Storm King Arts Center, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Whitney Museum of American Arts.

“As a recent grad school graduate, being awarded the JGS Fellowship for Photography means the world to me. The timing is especially important considering the current state of the world and the hardships and uncertain futures that artists are facing right now,” said Cadet. “This fellowship will go a long way in supporting my artistic practice by relieving me of some of my everyday financial burdens and granting me time to focus on doing what I love and make work,” she added.

Said Joy of Giving Something, Inc. (JGS): “The Joy of Giving Something, Inc. was made possible by the sale of master photographs collected by Howard Stein and then donated to JGS. We are very pleased to partner with NYFA to use our resources to help continue this legacy and support the next generation of accomplished artists working in photography and we congratulate and wish all the recipients our best.”

Michael L. Royce, Executive Director, NYFA, remarked: “We are thrilled to recognize Zana Briski, Widline Cadet, Ahndraya Parlato, Joshua Rashaad McFadden, and Jeannette Rodríguez Píneda with JGS Fellowships for Photography, which are supported through the generosity of the Joy of Giving Something, Inc. We hope this award will help them to push their practices forward and continue sharing their unique creative perspectives with the world in addition to providing some financial relief in these challenging times.”

Find out about our additional awards and grants here and visit NYFA Source, a free directory of over 12,000 opportunities, grants, and services for individual artists nationwide. Sign up for our free bi-weekly newsletter NYFA News to receive announcements about future NYFA events and programs.

Image: Widline Cadet, Seremoni Disparisyon #1.20 (Ritual [Dis]Appearance #1.20), 2020, archival pigment print