RESIDENCIES
Artists-in-Residence and Curators-in-Residence
Artists and Curators-in-Residence are exposed to the history of the University, the neighborhood, and the larger Express Newark community. Individuals are selected based on their deeply felt, innovative, and thoughtful practices of connecting with local communities, while also being part of broader conversations around portraiture and lens-based approaches to imaging, identity, race, and place within contemporary art. Residents are encouraged to create ambitious and challenging projects that bridge public and private spaces and to participate in public programming such as panel discussions, lectures, and workshops. Residents are provided with studio spaces, 24-hour access, stipends, and a production budget for projects. Average residencies are six months to one year.
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Artists-in-Residence and Curators-in-Residence are selected on an invitation-only basis.
Dahlia Elsayed September 2024 - July 2025
Dahlia Elsayed uses visual elements of landscape, cartography, and cosmology to make myth pictures for placelessness: visual documents that recount unreliable oral histories and anticipate alternate futures. Her paintings, prints, textiles and installations use a symbolic vocabulary rooted in Southwest Asian & North African decorative traditions - lush, colorful, fantastical, immersive - that make reference to the actual landscape experiences of displacement over multiple generations of her family.
Her work has been exhibited at galleries and institutions throughout the United States and internationally, including the Cairo Biennale, Morgan Lehman Gallery, Robert Miller Gallery, BravinLee Programs, The New Jersey State Museum and The Ford Foundation Galleries. Her work is in the public collections of the Newark Museum, the Zimmerli Museum, Johnson & Johnson Corporation, the US Department of State, amongst others. Dahlia has received awards from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Edward Albee Foundation, Visual Studies Workshop, the MacDowell Colony, Women’s Studio Workshop, Headlands Center for the Arts, and the NJ State Council on the Arts. She received her MFA from Columbia University, and lives and works in New Jersey. Ms. Elsayed is Professor of Humanities at CUNY LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, NY.
Photograph by Sara Stadtmiller
Adama Delphine Fawundu September 2023 - July 2024
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Adama Delphine Fawundu is a photographer and visual artist born in Brooklyn, NY of Bubi, Mende, Bamileke, and Krim descent. Her distinct visual language centers on themes of indigenization and ancestral memory.
Photograph by Emma Marie Chiang
fayemi shakur September 2019 - July 2020
fayemi is a writer, cultural critic, interdisciplinary artist and curator residing in Newark, New Jersey. Her writing has been featured in The New York Times, Hyperallergic, CNN Style,VICE, HYCIDE, The International Review of African American Art, Nueva Luz Photographic Journal, and MFON: Women Photographers in the African Diaspora among other books and publications. Recently, she was selected as a 2019 Critical Studies Artist in Residence at the Center for Photography at Woodstock. Her recently published limited edition, 146-page risoprint artbook, “A Womb of Violet; An Anthology” features a collection of contemporary voices in poetry and art by Black women artists that pay homage to the work of Black feminist/womanist thinkers, writers and poets, and is now available at Project for Empty Space.
Photograph by Timothy Ivy
Scheherazade Tillet September 2019- July 2022
Named after the famous feminist storyteller of the “Arabian Nights,” Scheherazade Tillet is a Trinidadian and African American photographer, art therapist, and social justice organizer. In 2003, she co-founded A Long Walk Home (ALWH), a Chicago-based national nonprofit, that uses art to empower young people and end violence against girls and women. She is also the Artistic Director of the award-winning multimedia performance, “Story of a Rape Survivor (SOARS)” which documents her sister, Salamishah’s healing journey from rape victim to renowned feminist activist and sexual assault survivor. Scheherazade inaugurated the Girl/Friends Leadership Institute, a yearlong artist-activist program that empowers girls and young women in Chicago to be social justice leaders in their schools, communities, and Chicago at large. Girl/Friends has been at the forefront of Chicago's recent protests against community, gender, and police violence and is currently designing the Rekia Boyd memorial project, as part of their larger public arts program, “The Visibility Project.” In Spring 2016, she was awarded the School of Art Institute of Chicago’s first artist-in-residence in Homan Square, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2016, she curated a national photography exhibition “Picturing Black Girlhood” at Columbia University, the first national exhibition to feature the works of African American women and girl photographers exploring the theme of girlhood in one show. Scheherazade earned a Masters of Art Therapy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a B.A. from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Scheherazade Tillet is the inaugural artist-in-residence between Shine and New Arts Justice Initiative at Express Newark.
Dominique Duroseau September 2018 - July 2019
Dominique Duroseau is an interdisciplinary artist, whose practice explores themes of racism, socio-cultural issues, and existential dehumanization. Her exhibitions, performances, and screenings include SATELLITE ART and PULSE Play in Miami; The Kitchen, The Brooklyn Museum, El Museo del Barrio, A.I.R. Gallery, BronxArtSpace, Rush Arts Gallery, and Smack Mellon in New York City; The Newark Museum, Index Arts, Project for Empty Space, and Gallery Aferro in Newark, NJ. Her recent exhibitions and talks include: solo at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, a panelist at Black Portraiture[s] at Harvard and a lecture at Vassar. She was a fellow at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, has received artist residencies from Gallery Aferro and Index Art Center and recently was accepted to the Wassaic Project and Shine Portrait Studio. Duroseau holds a Bachelor’s in Architecture, New Jersey Institute of Technology, and a Master of Fine Arts, Kean University.
Ian Cofre September 2017 - May 2019
Ian Cofre is an independent curator, writer, and translator based in Brooklyn, NY. He works with emerging and established artists, and his main areas of interest are Latin America, examining the art market, alternative economies and their modes of art production, turning the lens onto underrepresented artists and marginalized communities, and contextualizing artists cross-generationally. His writings appear in the Brooklyn Rail, artcritical, and Arte al Día, and he recently contributed an essay for the catalog, Wanderlust: Actions, Traces, Journeys 1967—2017. He is working—as Project Manager and Curator of Visual Arts—with Dr. Eva Giloi to develop a performance and exhibition cycle in Newark, NJ titled Newark Rhythms to take place in 2018-19.
Kalia Brooks Nelson, PhD, is a New York based independent curator and writer. Brooks Nelson is currently an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Photography and Imaging at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and at Parsons in the School of Art, Media and Technology. Brooks Nelson holds a Ph.D. in Aesthetics and Art Theory from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. She received her M.A. in Curatorial Practice from the California College of the Arts in 2006, and was a Helena Rubinstein Fellow in Critical Studies at the Whitney Independent Study Program 2007/2008. She has served as a consulting curator with the City of New York through the Department of Cultural Affairs and Gracie Mansion Conservancy. Brooks Nelson is also currently an ex-officio trustee on the Board of the Museum of the City of New York.
Photograph Courtesy of Deborah Willis
Duron Jackson is Brooklyn based multi-disciplinary artist born in Harlem, New York. He received his MFA in Sculpture at Bard College, Milton Avery School of Art. Jackson is a 2013 recipient of the prestigious Fulbright research fellowship, granted by the U.S. State Department for creative research in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, where he was concurrently artist in residence at Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia. Duron Jackson has been featured in the AIM Biennial at Bronx Museum, New York City. Modern Painters magazine listed Jackson as one of the 100 artists to watch for 2012, the same year he was awarded Brooklyn Museum’s Raw/Cooked solo exhibition sponsored by Bloomberg Media. Duron’s residency is supported by Shine while he works on his solo exhibition, and multimedia and portrait based public art project, The Missing, at Aljira, A Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, NJ.
Deborah Wills September 2017 - May 2018
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Deborah Willis, Ph.D, is University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and exhibiting photographer, where she teaches courses on photography and imaging, iconicity, and cultural histories visualizing the black body, women, and gender. Her research examines photography’s multifaceted histories, visual culture, the photographic history of Slavery and Emancipation, contemporary women photographers and beauty. She received the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and was a Richard D. Cohen Fellow in African and African American Art, Hutchins Center, Harvard University and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. Professor Willis received the NAACP Image Award in 2014 for her co-authored book (with Barbara Krauthamer) Envisioning Emancipation. Other notable projects include The Black Female Body A Photographic History, Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers – 1840 to the Present, Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present, Michelle Obama: The First Lady in Photographs, a NAACP Image Award Literature Winner, and Black Venus 2010: They Called Her ‘Hottentot’.
Community Partners
From its foundation, SHINE was built together with Community Partners who are artists, photographers, entrepreneurs and others whose work is committed to representing the City of Newark, NJ in a positive light. Community Partners created a resource that balances access, programming special events, exhibitions, and educational workshops.” Inaugural partners and advisors include:
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Colleen Gutwein O’Neal is a photographer practicing both digital and analog formats from the Northeast, United States. She works predominantly in documentary and portraiture styles, but also incorporates alternative photographic processes in her exploration of the human experience. O’Neal’s studio has been in Newark, NJ since 2006 which has been the inspiration behind documenting artists in the area for her most extensive series, begun in 2013,The Newark Arts Photo Documentary Project. With a forthcoming exhibition of this work in 2018, Colleen will give a ruminative perspective of these artists with lasting distinction.
Tamara Fleming Photography is a boutique photography and visual communications support agency that produces clean, artistic portrait, lifestyle and authentic stock imagery. Through purpose driven photography we play a key part in helping brands by empowering marketing initiatives designed to attract attention, build awareness and drive real results for consultants, foundations, nonprofits and corporations. With a strong foundation in marketing and a keen understanding of how visuals influence the ability to rise above the crowd, we create relevant images that is impactful and ignites action.
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Tinnetta Bell is a New Jersey based studio portrait artist and commercial photographer, specializing in people, beauty, corporate, entertainment, and author photography. Tinnetta combines her background in art with her photography, creating modern, lifestyle portraits. Her clients include models, actors, entrepreneurs, small business owners, best selling authors, business/lifestyle coaches, radio - tv personalities, singers, celebrities, non-profit organizations. She received her Bachelors of Arts in Sociology and a Minor in Art from Rutgers University, in Newark NJ. As a Community Partner with Shine Portrait Studio, Ms. Bell intends to focus on photographer development programming, evolving her vision by means of networking as well as offering portrait opportunities to families in need.