Silver Eye

Silver Eye is delighted to announce the artists of Fellowship 25!

This year we had more than 200 applicants from around the world reflecting innovative and thoughtful approaches to contemporary photography. We sincerely thank this year's jurors, Nelson Chan and Dionne Lee, and everyone who submitted their work.

The Fellowship 25 International Award and Honorable Mentions recognize rising talents or established photographers from anywhere in the world. The Fellowship 25 International Award recipient is Ramona Jingru Wang with Alana Perino and Brett Davis awarded Honorable Mentions.

The Fellowship 25 Keystone Award and Honorable Mentions recognize outstanding artists living or making work within the state of Pennsylvania. Sobia Ahmad is the recipient of the Fellowship 25 Keystone Award, and Paolo Morales and Clare Sheedy were awarded Honorable Mentions.

"It was fun and difficult to jury the 2025 Silver Eye Fellowship. We reviewed an incredible amount of work that showed great depth for the medium of photography and an endless inquiry for the world that we inhabit. This was such a privilege and so inspiring to be a part of. Congrats to the winners and honorable mentions."

• Nelson Chan and Dionne Lee

Fellowship 25 is supported directly by Arts Equity and Education Fund and The Leonian Foundation.

Participating Artists

1. Ramona Jingru Wang employs documentary photography to craft narratives that transcend the mere studium. Rooted in her Asian heritage, her work delves into themes of identity, community, and the deep connections between humans and their surrounding space as well as the natural land. Wang probes how images intertwine with our perception of reality, fostering unique connections between individuals and spaces, and shedding light on the compassionate bonds that photographs can nurture. She studied in the International Center of Photography-Bard College, and graduated with an MFA in photography from the Pratt Institute, New York.

2. Alana Perino studied European Intellectual History and Photography at Wesleyan University, where their questions concerning the nature of belonging were only further problematized. After working as a photojournalist in the Israeli-Palestinian territories, skeptical of the privileged nature of their stay, Alana returned to the United States. They lived in California for eight years, crisscrossing the country to photograph "American" heritage sites. In the summer of 2021, they returned to the East Coast to photograph the people and places that raised them and to complete the MFA Photography program at RISD. Alana resides on the unceded land of the Pokanoket, Wampanoag and Narragansett in Providence, Rhode Island where they are currently an Assistant Professor at Johnson & Wales University.

3. Brett Davis is a father, partner and artist based in Ohio. He holds a BA in American Studies from Georgetown University and an MFA in Visual Art from the Ohio State University. Davis’ art practice draws connections between artmaking and fatherhood through explorations of love, care, joy, domestic space, intergenerational relationships, and transnational possibility. He collaborates closely with his five-year-old child, Toko, as a method to disrupt the hierarchies of family, empower a young child and himself and translate the experience of parenthood into visual art. The results of their making take the form of expansive, materially rich intermedia installations and self-published artist books.

4. Sobia Ahmad is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice explores the transcendental power of everyday experiences, objects, and rituals through film, photography, and social practice. She draws from non-western intellectual and spiritual lexicons, specifically traditions of devotional poetry and oral storytelling associated with Sufism. Exercising the meditative potential of analog processes, she considers how slowness and tactility might activate our inner lives and help us experience various spiritual and political dimensions of social and ecological engagement. Ahmad was born and raised in Pakistan and moved to the United States at the age of fourteen. She holds an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University (2024), a B.S. in Community Health (2015), and a B.A in Studio Art (2016), both from the University of Maryland College Park.

5. Paolo Morales is a photographer whose solo exhibitions include Muhlenberg College (2026), Bucknell University (2025), Delaware County Community College (2022), Cabrini University (2021), XYZ Art Gallery at VirginiaTech (2020), The George Washington University (2018), and Hamiltonian Gallery (2018). Publications include VICE magazine, Papersafe magazine, The Washington Post, Dazed, and The New Yorker. He was a participant at Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, a 2016-2018 Fellow at Hamiltonian Artists, and an artist-in-residence at Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, and the Center for Photography at Woodstock. Morales received an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design and is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Photography at Bucknell University. He was born and raised in New York City and lives with his wife and corgi in Philadelphia.

6. Clare Sheedy lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches art to children and works at a Downtown box office. In her practice, she touches surfaces she can and cannot see — exploring the if/what/when of the edges of perception and presence. Her work reflects an ongoing surrender to the experience of imaginative extension, as one that both solidifies and liquefies senses-and-self. She communicates only what she is capable of knowing: something very small, a beam of light in a blue ball, one sound in static-se(a/e). Her work comes from a desire to look and move in truth, and to reach the question she cannot hear. Through guttural, staccato movements, she creates pressure-cookers — glossed containers of localized steam that crescendo into a high-pitched hum. If anything, she hopes the viewer opens her sight-lines with heart, and that in that opening they feel a tidal pulsing through their own.