CatchLight’s annual call for Fellowship applications drew interest from more than 150 artists around the world and of those, we recently announced the four recipients of our annual CatchLight Fellowship: Koral Carballo, Roopa Gogineni, Bayeté Ross Smith, and Daniella Zalcman. Each of the Fellows receive a $30,000 grant, professional development and support of their work.
The CatchLight Fellowship provides visionaries in the field grants to develop impactful storytelling projects, engage audiences and continue their work as innovators and leaders defining the future of the field. CatchLight seeks visual storytellers who are willing to question the industry, stand for inclusivity and innovate as creatives and leaders.
“While we were able to award four fellowships for this signature program, it was evident from the application process that there is an abundance of visual storytellers doing incredibly powerful and relevant work.”
CatchLight CEO Elodie Mailliet Storm.
Of the 150 applicants for the Fellowship, today we highlight the eight 2021 CatchLight Fellowship finalists and their work. Below, read more about these visual storytellers, their current work, and the projects they proposed to CatchLight.
To see more images from these artists, and to read more about their projects, check out our Instagram and Facebook accounts, where we’re featuring select images from each visual storyteller’s project. In addition, we invite you to visit their websites—linked in their bios below—to learn more about their work and current projects.
In future months, and as their projects develop and progress, we’ll feature the work of our four CatchLight Fellows.
Be on the lookout in early 2022 for our open call for Fellowship applications. If you’re not on our newsletter, be sure to sign up today. Just scroll down to the bottom of this page, enter your email and click “sign up.”
Castellanos is a freelance photographer interested in the power of connotation of the images and their ability to explore the boundaries between what appears and what is actual. Her current work aims to explore and demystify the ancestral knowledge of farmers in the Andean communities to predict and prepare for environmental changes.
Burrell is a storyteller who uses photography, film and site-specific installation to examine issues of race, class, gender and intergenerational dynamics based in Oakland, California. His work focuses on notions of kinship, diasporic narratives and the gaps between place and belonging. His most recent series, “Mama’s Babies,” traces his family’s history through slavery, the Great Migration, the crack era and the current displacement of Black people in Oakland through gentrification.
Lee (he/they) is a queer diasporic Korean documentary filmmaker, writer, and community organizer. He’s interested in building collaborative, community-based models of filmmaking that reject traditional hierarchies of authority and that equip queer and trans people of color with media-making skills. His debut feature, UNTITLED KQT PROJECT (supported by Firelight Media, Sundance and CAAM), follows a chosen family of queer and trans nightlife performers in Seoul, Korea, as they navigate gender, seek belonging and protect their freedoms, all while joyfully rejecting societal pressures to conform.
Castillo focuses his work toward social subjects that promote ideas of solidarity, tolerance and respect at the same time questioning power structures and the role he can play in creating a deeper and more effective dialogue. His life-long work aims to give an in-depth look at the personal stories, the living conditions, and the faces of the Venezuelan diaspora in Latin America. With more than three million migrants in the region, it represents one of the biggest exodus in Latin American history.
Taylor-Lind is an English/Swedish photojournalist who works for leading editorial publications all over the world on issues relating to women, population and war. Her project, 5K from the Frontline, is a 7-year long multidisciplinary project documenting the lives of communities living between 50 meters and 5 kilometres of frontline positions in the Donbass region of Eastern Ukraine.
Xu is a New York City and Taipei-based photographer and director. Born in China and raised in New York City’s Chinatown, Xu explores the world around him through his unique cultural perspective. Xu’s project, My Americans, is a visual, ethnographic survey, exploring the Chinese American community who were once denied legal citizenship rights, and even now, are continued to be treated as cultural outsiders and perpetual foreigners. This project chronicles an intergenerational community where old, young and those in between share a common narrative of seeking to find a place in a land that their ancestors may not be from, but dreamt would one day offer them a better life.
McFadden is a visual artist and assistant professor of photography at Rochester Institute of Technology. He holds a BA in Fine Art from Elizabeth City State University and a Master of Fine Art from Savannah College of Art and Design. His work primarily explores African American male identity, masculinity, notions of the father figure and the photographic archive. McFadden also focuses on social justice issues and documents protests across the United States. His project was centered on documenting the valuable perspectives and lives of Black trans women and people of the trans experience in Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi.
Boushnak spent the last decade seeking remarkable stories of women in different parts of the Arab world. She wanted to highlight the obstacles these women faced throughout their lives to gain access to education and stress the role that education played in their lives. For the Catchlight Fellowship, Boushnak proposed to lead an educational project with small groups of art students from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Tunisia and Jordan to create solutions to counter the public schools’ textbooks using photography as a main tool to provoke change.