What unique questions are prompted by the intersection of performance and photography? And how does gender factor in? In this panel, three lens-based artists will discuss their practices in relation to gender and performance.
Please join us for a conversation between artists Sam Contis, Keisha Scarville and Anique Jordan, moderated by Lauren O'Neill-Butler.
Presented by BFA Photography at the School of Art, Media and Technology.
Keisha Scarville weaves together themes dealing with loss, latencies and the elusive body. Her work has been widely exhibited, including the International Center of Photography, Studio Museum of Harlem, Huxley-Parlour in London, ICA Philadelphia, Contact Gallery in Toronto, Lightwork, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Higher Pictures Gallery, and Webber Gallery in Los Angeles.
Recent group exhibitions include The 2nd Bienal das Amazonias (curated by Manuela Moscoso); 2025 Les Rencontres D’Arles; The Rose at CPW (2025 curated by Justine Kurland and Marina Chao); To Conjure at ICP (2025) which she co-curated alongside Elisabeth Sherman and Sara Ickow; and All of Them Witches, Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles (2020, curated by Dan Nadel and Laurie Simmons).
Her work is held in the collections of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Yale University Art Gallery, George Eastman House, Denver Museum of Art, and the Detroit Institute of Arts.
She has participated in numerous residencies including Lightwork, Baxter Street CCNY, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In addition, her work has appeared in Vice, Small Axe, and The New York Times where her work has also received critical review.
She is a recipient of the 2023 Creator Lab Photo Fund and awarded the inaugural Saltzman Prize in Photography in 2024. She is currently a Visiting Professor in the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University and a faculty member at Parsons School of Design in New York.
Her first book, lick of tongue rub of finger on soft wound, was published by MACK and shortlisted in the 2023 Aperture/Paris Photobook Awards. Her second book with MACK is scheduled to be published in Spring 2026.
Image Credit: Keisha Scarville,  Within/Between/Corpus (7), 2020Â
Anique Jordan is a Trinidadian-Canadian artist, writer and curator. Employing the theory of hauntology to challenge historical or dominant narratives to her practice, Jordan creates, what she calls, "impossible images" by considering different logics of time, the black surreal and the marvellous. Jordan is an AICAD Fellow and Assistant Professor of Art Design History and Theory at Parsons School of Design.
Sam Contis is a Senior Critic in Photography at the Yale School of Art, and is based in Brooklyn. Her exhibition Phases is currently on view at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York through February 8th.
Image Credit: Sam Contis, Five Kilometers, 2025. Installation view, American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2025.
Photo: Steven Probert
Lauren O’Neill-Butler is a New York-based writer and editor. Her books include The War of Art: A History of Artists’ Protest in America (Verso, 2025) and Let’s Have a Talk: Conversations with Women on Art and Culture (Karma, 2021). She has written for Aperture, Art Journal, Bookforum, and The New York Times, among many others, and has also contributed essays to various exhibition catalogues. She received a Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant in 2020 and the Beverley Art Writers Travel Grant in 2023.
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