Artist Talks at Moore College of Art & Design
Sponsored by Moore College and Aperturent
Political Landscapes
Photography has long served as a powerful tool for bearing witness, preserving memory, and inspiring social change. Join Lori Waselchuk, Naomieh Jovin, and William E. Williams for a thought-provoking conversation moderated by Stephan Jahanshahi exploring how contemporary photographers engage with the political landscape through personal narrative, historical inquiry, and community-based practice. Waselchuk examines the intersections of climate change, transportation, incarceration, and collective responsibility through socially engaged projects rooted in collaboration. Jovin investigates identity, migration, and intergenerational memory by weaving together family archives and contemporary imagery to confront erasure and celebrate cultural resilience. Williams transforms historically significant American landscapes into contemplative photographs that reconnect viewers with overlooked narratives of African American history and the enduring legacy of place. Together, these artists will discuss photography's unique ability to document injustice, challenge dominant narratives, preserve cultural memory, and encourage dialogue about the social and political forces that continue to shape our communities. This compelling panel offers an opportunity to consider how photography can move beyond observation to become an enduring catalyst for reflection, empathy, and change.
Moderator
Stephan Jahanshahi
Stephan Jahanshahi
Artists
Naomieh Jovin
Naomieh Jovin is a visual artist with a focus in photography. She received her BFA in Photography and Digital Arts from Moore College of Art and Design (‘17). Her work is influenced by the absence of her late mother as well as her experiences growing up as a first generation Haitian-American. In her work, she utilizes appropriated photos from old family albums and incorporates her own photographs to try and recreate similar moments. This process is meant to illustrate resistance and intergenerational trauma and how we carry them through our bodies. The incorporation of appropriated family photos, writings from relatives, and her own personal work allows Jovin to reflect on her family history, while paying homage to generations before her and their generational resistance against erasure.
Naomieh Jovin currently lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.
Lori Waselchuk
Lori Waselchuk is photographer, filmmaker, curator, and socially engaged artist. Lori’s artistic practice is rooted in community, the possibilities, the tensions and challenges of working together for a common idea or good. Past collaborative projects include Grace Before Dying (Umbrage Editions, 2011), about a hospice program in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where both the caregivers and the patients are serving long-term prison sentences. Lori is also a curator and coordinator of numerous exhibition projects including the Women’s Mobile Museum, co-created with Zanele Muholi, and produced by TILT Institute for the Contemporary Image. Lori is the recipient of Leeway Foundation’s Media Artist & Activist Residency and the Transformation Award, Velocity Fund Grant, Pew Fellowship for the Arts, Aaron Siskind Foundation’s Individual Photographer Fellowship, and the Southern African Gender and Media Award. Her projects have been exhibited in Africa, South America, North America and Europe and her work is published widely in books and publications. Lori is currently the curator-in-residence at the Writers Room and the director/producer of the upcoming film series, Abolition Conversations.
Willie Williams
William E. Williams is Audrey A. and John L. Dusseau Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Fine Arts and Curator of Photography at Haverford College in Haverford, Pennsylvania; he has been affiliated with Haverford since 1978, after receiving his M.F.A. in photography that year from the Yale University School of Art. He has organized over one hundred exhibitions in forty-eight years, including work by James Van Der Zee, Lewis Hine, Diane Arbus, Roy De Carava, Walker Evans, Paul Strand, Andy Warhol, Harold Edgerton, Lisette Model, and Man Ray. His photographs have been widely exhibited including group and solo exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art, George Eastman House Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, The National Gallery, Smith College and the Smithsonian. His photographs are in many public collections including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Baltimore Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Princeton University Art Museum and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Williams is a 1997 Pew Fellow in the Arts, and has received individual artist fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts in 1986, 1997 and 2003. He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for 2003- 04. In 2016 in partnership with the Print Center Philadelphia he was awarded a NEA Fellowship to publish a monograph of Party Pictures. He was artist in residence at the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut for 2023-2025, and the museum published the monograph Their Kindred Earth in 2025 distributed by Wesleyan University Press.