Silver Eye

Fellowship 20 Honorable Mentions Alex Christopher Williams, Zora J Murff, Louie Palu, Michael Darough, and Phillip Cheung will show a selection of work along side the Fellowship 20 Award winner Rory Doyle's exhibition, Delta Hill Riders.

Grappling with issues of personal identity, family relationships, systemic racism, climate politics, and the banality of life during wartime, these projects cover a wide array of geographies, display a diverse breadth of photographic talent, and utilize an innovative array of techniques.

Participating Artists

1. Louie Palu is a documentary photographer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in festivals, publications, exhibitions and collections internationally. He is a 2016-17 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and a Harry Ransom Center Research Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin.

   He is the recipient of numerous awards including two Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting Grants, 2011-12 Bernard L Schwartz Fellowship with the New America Foundation and Milton Rogovin Fellowship at the University of Arizona. He is well known for his work which examines social political issues such as human rights, conflict and poverty. He is currently working on a long-term project on the Arctic partnered with National Geographic Magazine and is a National Geographic Explorer. In 2019 his work was selected for the Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture.

2. Alex Christopher Williams is a photographer and independent curator at Minor League, an artists-run curatorial project in Atlanta, GA. He received his MFA in Photography from the University of Hartford and his BFA in Photography from Savannah College of Art and Design. His work has been previously shown at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, LA, The Safe House Black History Museum, Greensboro, AL, Wish Gallery, MINT, whitespec, all in Atlanta, GA, Con Artist Collective, New York, NY, and C/O Berlin, DE. His work has been featured in such publications as Der Greif, Oxford American, Photo-Emphasis, Juxtapoz Magazine, The Daily Beast, Orangbeg Press, Mull it Over and Aint-Bad Magazine.

3. Philip Cheung is a photographer based in Los Angeles. His photographs have been exhibited at venues across North America and Europe, such as the SFO Museum (San Francisco, USA), the National Portrait Gallery (London, UK) and the Lumix Festival (Hanover, Germany).

   He has been awarded grants by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council, and was shortlisted for the Aperture Portfolio Prize in 2018.

   The Magenta Foundation, Communication Arts, PDN’s 30 and American Photo have recognized Cheung. His work is held in the collection of Akkasah, Center for Photography at New York University in Abu Dhabi, and has been featured and reviewed in various publications, including Harper’s, the British Journal of Photography, Canadian Art, The Washington Post and TIME. A selection of work from his series Arctic Front is currently being exhibited at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.

4. Michael Darough received his BFA in photography from Arizona State University and his MFA in photography from the University of Memphis. Darough has taught at Lycoming College in Williamsport, PA and is a nationally exhibiting artist whose work deals with personal, cultural and self-projected identity. He is currently Assistant Professor of Art and Photography at Baylor University.

5. Zora J Murff is an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Arkansas. He received his MFA from the University of Nebraska—Lincoln and holds a BS in Psychology from Iowa State University. Merging his educational experiences, Murff uses his practice to highlight intersections between various social systems and art. He has published books with Aint-Bad Editions (PULLED FROM PUBLISHER) and Kris Graves Projects. His most recent monograph, At No Point In Between (Dais Books), was selected as the winner of the Independently Published category of the Lucie Foundation Photo Book Awards. Murff is also a Co-Curator of Strange Fire Collective, a group of interdisciplinary artists, writers, and curators working to construct and promote an archive of artwork created by diverse maker