Aurora’s 2026 Residents will be selected by a panel comprised of Aurora PhotoCenter board members, Indianapolis art community members, and art advisors and professionals from outside Indiana.
Kris Graves is an artist and publisher based in New York and California. Graves creates artwork that deals with societal problems and aims to use art as a means to inform people about cultural issues. Using a mix of conceptual and documentary practices, Graves photographs the subtleties of societal power and its impact on the built environment. He explores how capitalism and power have shaped countries -- and how that can be seen and experienced in everyday life. Graves also works to elevate the representation of people of color in the fine art canon; and to create opportunities for conversation about race, representation, and urban life. He photographs to preserve memory.
Graves received his BFA in Visual Arts from S.U.N.Y. Purchase College and has been published and exhibited globally, including Museum of Modern Art, New York; Getty Institute, Los Angeles; and National Portrait Gallery in London, England; among others. Permanent collections include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Getty Institute, Schomburg Center, Whitney Museum, Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Brooklyn Museum; and The Wedge Collection, Toronto; amongst others. Graves also sits on the board of Blue Sky Gallery: Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts, Portland; and The Architectural League of New York as Vice President of Photography.
Shana Lopes, PhD, is an Assistant Curator of Photography at SFMOMA. Born and raised in San Francisco, she has curated or co-curated exhibition such as: Constellations: Photographs in Dialogue, Sightlines: Photographs from the Collection, A Living for Us All: Artists and the WPA, Zanele Muholi: Eye Me, The SECA 2024 Art Award, People Make this Place: SFAI Stories, and Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules. Over the past fifteen years, she has gained curatorial experience at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Justin A. Carney uses autobiographical photography to question how death and grief affect familial connections — the bonds that keep a family together and cause them to separate, and how those bonds shape an individual.
Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, Carney was awarded first place in the Single Image category of LensCulture’s 2023 Art Photography Awards. He is a recipient of the Reva Shiner Memorial Award in the 2022 National Society of Arts and Letters Competition and Exhibition and the Best in Show Award in the 2020 Emerging Vision: Biennial Student Show at the Colorado Photographic Art Center. Carney’s work has been exhibited nationally and abroad, including in China, South Korea, London, and Spain.
Carney received his MFA in Photography from Indiana University, Bloomington in 2023. He was an instructor at Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis and is currently Assistant Professor of Photography at Colorado State University.
Mary Goodwin is the publisher at Waltz Books, a photobook publishing company with a focus on the relationship between the photographic image and the book format. Her photographic practice depicts the land as a site of memory, culture, and politics.
Goodwin holds an MFA in Photography from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, where she also acquired a love of chilis, both red and green. Her writing about photography has appeared in photoeye booklist, f-stop magazine, and the Contact Sheet Annual.
As the former Associate Director at Light Work in Syracuse, New York, she curated exhibitions by Deana Lawson, Yolanda del Amo, and Stephen Chalmers, among other artists. Mary loves to talk about photobooks, and she has led a series of book talks, with artists, publishers, and designers, for Aurora in addition to her curatorial and administrative duties.
Osamu James Nakagawa was born in New York City in 1962 and raised in Tokyo. He returned to the United States; moving to Houston, Texas, at the age of 15. He received a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Houston in 1993. Currently, Mr. Nakagawa is the distinguished Professor and Ruth N. Halls Professor of Photography at Indiana University.
Nakagawa is a recipient of the 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2010 Higashikawa New Photographer of the Year, and 2015 Sagamihara Photographer of the Year in Japan. Nakagawa’s work has been exhibited internationally, including From the Cave, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum; 2019 Kyotographie, Eclipse＋ Kai: Osamu James Nakagawa, Gallery Sugata; Photography to End All Photography, Brandts Museum, Denmark; OKINAWA TRILOGY: Osamu James Nakagawa, Kyoto University of Art and Design; War/Photography, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston;After Photoshop: Manipulated Photography in the Digital Age, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and others.
His work is included in numerous collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; George Eastman Museum; Tokyo Photographic Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Sakima Art Museum, Okinawa; The Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and others. Nakagawa’s work appears in many international publications. Recently, his work was published in A World History of Photography 5th edition by Naomi Rosenblum, and A Shared Elegy: Emmet Gowin, Elijah Gowin, Takayuki Ogawa, Osamu James Nakagawa from Indiana University Press. Nakagawa’s monograph GAMA Caves is available from Akaaka Art Publisher in Tokyo, Japan.
Stefan Petranek is an image-based artist and associate professor of Photography and Intermedia at Herron School of Art & Design at IU Indianapolis. Working with subjects that range from genetics to climate change, his work explores how contemporary culture, especially through advances in science and technology, affects our perception of nature. He brings nearly 20 years of academic teaching experience and was conferred a 2023 Herron Community Engagement Award for his work with diverse community and university partners to advance student artistic experiences in the Indianapolis metro area.
As a 2021 Critical Mass Finalist and awardee of the 2018 Christel DeHaan Artist of Distinction Award, he regularly exhibits work nationally and internationally. Recently his work has appeared in Floating Worlds—The Intersection of Art, Science and Poetry at Zero Station Gallery in Portland, ME (2024); The Mongolian National Modern Art Gallery (2023); The Mary Byrd Gallery at The University of Augusta, GA (2023); The Ellen Noël Museum in Odessa, TX (2022); and the Photography Museum of Lishui in China (2022). Petranek’s The Future is Broken, Brain Tumor Diaries, and The Genetic Portrait Projects have all received critical recognition.
Exploring natural and social histories through photographs, books, paintings, objects and film, Betsy Stirratt (Programming Committee) creates multi-layered narratives about the interactions of humans and nature. She is Director Emeritus of the Grunwald Gallery of Art at Indiana University Bloomington where, since 1987, she curated exhibitions including Personal: Selections from the Robert J. Shiffler Collection and more recently State of Nature: Picturing Indiana Biodiversity. She has edited several books and catalogues, including [Re]Imagining Science, Indiana University Press (2017), Framing Beauty: Intimate Visions, Grunwald Gallery, Indiana University (2017), Human Nature, School of Fine Arts Gallery, Indiana University (2007), Les Vérités du Sexe, Editions Marval, Paris, France (French, German editions, 2003) and Feminine Persuasion: Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN (2003).
Exhibiting her own work widely since 1983, solo exhibitions include La Maladie at The Mütter Museum in Philadelphia and the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago and Veiled Taxonomies at the Center for Book Arts in New York among others. Her work has been included in group exhibits at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Indianapolis Museum of Art, and White Columns and Art in General in New York. She is the recipient of several grants, including a Visual Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and awards from the Indiana Arts Commission and the American Craft Council.