WOPHA RESEARCH FELLOWSHIP

WOPHA RESEARCH FELLOWSHIP

The WOPHA Research Fellowship supports two exemplary research initiatives by emerging and established authors examining themes related to women and non-binary voices in photography.

The program facilitates the writing of scholarly essays that engage with both primary and secondary sources. Through this fellowship, WOPHA aims to support authors by funding the production of original essays while also providing opportunities for mentorship, networking, and publication of innovative scholarship focused on women and non-binary photographers.

The 2025–2026 WOPHA Research Fellowship is supported by the Pérez CreARTE Grant Program by The Jorge M. Pérez Family Foundation at The Miami Foundation and The Betsy Hotel.

2026 WOPHA RESEARCH FELLOWS

Lauren Baccus is a Miami-based writer and researcher whose work centers on arts education, contemporary art, and Caribbean visual culture. Her practice foregrounds critical inquiry, close visual analysis, and community-grounded scholarship, with a particular interest in how images shape narratives of identity, memory, and belonging within the Caribbean and its diasporas.

Drawing on experience across museums, cultural institutions, and independent projects, Lauren develops research-driven essays, lectures, and public programs that make complex ideas accessible to broad audiences while remaining grounded in rigorous scholarship.

Her ongoing research explores the intersections of art, identity, performance, and material culture in contemporary Caribbean art, informing both her writing and her curatorial and educational practice.

Project Title
Intimate Archives and Black Feminist Memory

Project Description
This research and essay positions Caribbean women’s photography as a practice of intimate archiving and Black feminist memory work, centering images that hold family, kinship, and everyday life against the erasures of official history. The project asks: How do Caribbean women’s photographic archives re-script the visual language of Caribbean family, migration, and belonging beyond tourist and colonial images? Focusing on photographers and projects across the Caribbean and its diasporas, the essay will examine family albums, domestic interiors, ritual practices, queer kinship, and scenes of everyday care. Core case studies will include Widline Cadet’s lens-based work on Haitian diasporic memory and intimacy, Samantha Box’s photographic and collaged family histories that reframe Caribbean diasporic belonging, and Nathyfa Michel’s use of personal and archival imagery to think through Caribbean memory and futurity. These artists will be read alongside women-led Miami memory initiatives such as Black Miami-Dade, whose community archiving practices foreground Black, Caribbean, and Afro-diasporic life in South Florida.

The project will read these visual archives through Black feminist thinkers of the archive, care, and the everyday (such as Saidiya Hartman, Tina Campt, and Omise’eke Tinsley), alongside Caribbean scholars of memory and home. Methodologically, it will combine close visual analysis with attention to photographic circulation and use: how images are held, shared, displayed, or digitized within families and community archives.

Miami functions as a crucial site and comparative frame, linking Caribbean family photography and studio practices to diasporic archives and memory projects rooted in the city. During the residency, research in local collections, community history initiatives, and conversations with women leading memory work in Miami will deepen the project’s understanding of how Caribbean and Black Miami archives intersect. Ultimately, the essay aims to show how these photographic practices not only preserve memory but actively imagine alternative genealogies and futures for Caribbean and diasporic communities.

Cristina E. Pardo Porto is a scholar of Latinx and Latin American art and visual culture specializing in photography. She holds a PhD from the Graduate Center, CUNY, and is an assistant professor at Syracuse University. Her research examines the intersections of historical archives, race, gender, migration, and the environment in relation to Central America and the Caribbean. Her current book project offers a decolonial history of photography from the contemporary perspective of diasporic artists. Recent curatorial projects include the exhibition Joiri Minaya: Unseeing the Tropics at the Syracuse University Art Museum (Spring 2025). She is the coeditor of Plants and Animals in Latin American Cultural Production (University of Florida Press) and two special issues of the journal Istmo, both titled Photography in, on, and from Central America. Her scholarly work includes published and forthcoming articles on art photography in Art Journal, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, Hispanic Review, and MLN. Pardo Porto was the 2023–24 Research Fellow at the Syracuse University Humanities Center and a 2025 Visiting Fellow at the Bard Graduate Center.

Project Title
Caribbean Photography’s Material Pasts and Presents

Project Description
I will advance my book Latent Photographies, which reframes the history of photography through contemporary Caribbean and Central American artists — women and queer photographers of Afro-, Asian-, and Indigenous descent working across U.S.-based diasporas. The book examines how these artists repurpose early photographic processes to critique the racialized, gendered, and imperial logics embedded in the medium’s canonical historiography. It demonstrates that so-called “obsolete” analogue practices continue to shape the political and affective stakes of image-making today.

Contemporary photographers studied include Felli Maynard (Colombia/Panama/New Orleans/NYC); Juana Valdés (Cuba/Miami/Massachusetts); Ada DelPilar (Puerto Rico); Felix Quintana (El Salvador/LA); Lissy Mineo (Dominican Republic/NYC); Giana DeDier (Panama); Joiri Minaya (Dominican Republic/NYC); Felix Gonzalez-Torres (Cuba); Erika Morillo (Dominican Republic/NJ); Gabrielle Báez (Puerto Rico); and María Magdalena Campos-Pons (Cuba/Nashville). Their practices revisit wet-plate collodion portraiture, cyanotypes, archival postcards, reactivations of family albums, and Polaroid compositions. By tracing how these works echo and challenge photography’s material past, the project foregrounds decolonial, feminist, and diasporic methodologies that unsettle Anglo- and Eurocentric narratives of photographic history while addressing questions of race, gender, migration, and cultural memory. The project argues that embedded within photography’s past lies a latent potential to reimagine the medium as a tool for visual justice.

As a fellow, I will complete the chapter “The Cyanotype: On Documenting” and draft the Epilogue. The chapter examines photography’s historical ties to extraction, beginning with Anna Atkins’s British and Foreign Ferns (1853), which used specimens from Jamaican plantations, to demonstrate the cyanotype’s entanglement with colonial documentation. The chapter centers works by Valdés, Mineo, Quintana, and DelPilar, whose practices challenge this legacy through anti-colonial mappings of geography, ecology, and infrastructure. The Epilogue concludes with Campos-Pons’s Polaroids, showing how their materiality summons anti-racist memory and Afro-diasporic spirituality, modeling photography as a decolonial feminist practice rooted in analogue nostalgia and unifying the book’s central themes.