The Paris Review: A Story in One Picture
A pure baby shining in white at the center of the frame, being held by a shirtless, barefoot boy. Something about it all is so sacred. I believe my main character in “An Unspoken,” Clara Parker, would have seen this in a dream and felt happy, or could just as easily been haunted by it. And this is everything the story truly hinges on.
—Ashleigh Bryant Phillips, “An Unspoken”
Hillbilly: Featured in Hulu Documentary Film
Featured in the Hulu Documentary film Hillbilly by Sally Rubin and and Ashley York
"hillbilly" is a documentary film that examines the iconic hillbilly image in media and culture. The film explores more than a hundred years of media representation of mountain and rural people and offers an urgent exploration of how we see and think about rural America.
Art and activism in Richmond have long been intertwined. Nightly protests made that relationship more visible than ever.
Featured in the Richmond Times Dispatch for my community printmaking work with Studio Two Three.
Carnegie Museum of Art: Feature on Storyboard
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
The New Yorker: Featured in Another Side of Appalachia by Courtney Balestier
“Appalachia is not a corner of the United States that cameras come to fresh. Artist-visitors have been making visual shorthand of the rural region for decades, and they have tended to seek the place’s more derisive scenes: the folded flesh of the obese, the writhing snakes of the Pentecostals, the scabbed injections of addicts. These subjects are there for the finding, but the photographer who focusses only on the sordid or the sensational has an outsider’s narrowness of vision. Harder to capture, and far more revealing, are the mysteries of Appalachia as they appear to Appalachians.”
RVA MAGAZINE: Using Art to Amplify Voices
A feature on my community print work with Studio Two Three in Richmond, Virginia.
Story Production for PBS Documentary: The Future of America’s Past
I worked as a Story Producer on the first season of the PBS Documentary Series The Future of America’s Past, directed by Hannah Ayers and Lance Warren.
Feature Shoot: Serpents, Religion, and Roots
A feature on my collaborative project with artist Mark Strandquist, With Signs Following.
Feature in Richmond Magazine: The Innovators
A feature on Studio Two Three’s community print work.
Featured in Institute for Contemporary Art: Kutunza Kila Mmoja
KUTUNZA KILA MMOJA Taking Care of Each Other, located in the Soul N’ Vinegar café space, celebrates artist Bukuru Nyandwi and the important resources Milk River Arts provides to artists in Richmond. The wallpaper, banner, prints, and community bulletin board that make up this project are a testament to Milk River Arts’ dedication and care for their community of neurodiverse artists. In addition to Bukuru, artists Barry O’Keefe, Aimee Joyaux, and Kate Fowler contributed their creative and technical expertise to make this project possible.
Founding Board Member: Looking at Appalachia
In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson declared unconditional war on poverty in the United States and nowhere was this war more photographed than Appalachia. A quick Google image search of “war on poverty” will yield several photographs of President Johnson on the porch of the Fletcher family home in Inez, Kentucky.
Many of the War on Poverty photographs, whether intentional or not, became a visual definition of Appalachia. These images have often drawn from the poorest areas and people to gain support for the intended cause, but unjustly came to represent the entirety of the region while simultaneously perpetuating stereotypes.
In an attempt to explore the diversity of Appalachia and establish a visual counter point, this project looks at Appalachia fifty years after the declaration of the War on Poverty. Drawing from a diverse population of photographers within the region, this new crowdsourced image archive will serve as a reference that is defined by its people as opposed to political legislation.