Speaking in Pairs Dialogue

Ida K. Lang Recital Hall, Hunter College, March 20, 2026

Participant Bios:

Luis Corzo

Luis Corzo [He/Him] (b. 1990, Guatemala City, Guatemala) is a Brooklyn-based, award-winning multidisciplinary artist. He received his BFA in Photography and Contemporary Creation at Universitat Abat Oliba CEU, Barcelona, in 2012. He primarily works using different disciplines of photography, but also utilizes video and archival media to investigate stories and phenomena that shape the contemporary condition of Latin America.

Vie Darling

Born to Liberian immigrants in Columbia, Maryland, Vie Darling is a Brooklyn-based artist, writer, and multidisciplinary practitioner whose work spans photography, spirituality, and cultural analysis. Their practice is rooted in what they call Spiritual Abolition, a shadow work framework within their broader concept of Cosmic Wellness, exploring healing, power, and transformation through creative expression. Vie has collaborated with organizations including Sad Girls Club, Nike, The Wing, and Ace Hotel New York, and has facilitated workshops and meditations across institutional and community spaces. Their writing and artwork have been published widely, with exhibitions at venues including Ace Hotel, MoMA PS1, and various independent galleries in New York.

Meredith Davenport

Meredith Davenport is an artist and educator living in upstate New York. She earned her MFA from Hunter College and her BFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology. Her documentary projects have appeared in National Geographic, German Geo, The New York Times Magazine, and many other national and international publications. Meredith has received the American Aftermath grant, a Pew Fellowship, The UNICEF Child Photo of the Year, and a Puffin Foundation grant; she has also been invited to residencies at Yaddo, VCCA, BANFF, Antenna Paper Machine, and the Everson Museum. Her work has been exhibited in New York at the International Center of Photography and Union Docs. Her book Theater of War was published in 2014 by Intellect Press and is distributed by the University of Chicago Press. Her book Membering was published in 2022 by Antenna Paper Machine. She is an Associate Professor of Photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Beth Griffith

Beth Griffith is a Texas-born singer and actress. She spent a college year abroad in France before completing a BA in Theatre at Saint Mary’s College–Notre Dame. After graduating, she traveled to Austria to study with the American Institute of Musical Studies, where she met director Max Lehner. Recognizing her unique abilities, Lehner encouraged her to move to Germany to continue her work. Griffith initially lived near Munich while studying at the Munich Hochschule für Musik. During this time, she performed Mauricio Kagel’s Phonophonie, a 30-minute theater-music work originally written for William Pearson and later adapted for Griffith by Lehner. Kagel subsequently invited her to Cologne, where he and Karlheinz Stockhausen were living and teaching. There, Griffith performed numerous works by both composers and many of their students. For 23 years, she performed across Europe, appearing at new music festivals, opera houses, and theaters, and recording for dozens of radio stations and record labels. In 2000, she returned to the United States, settling in New York City with her composer husband, John McGuire, and their two children. Since then, she has worked primarily in avant-garde theater, music, and film.

Tess Hamilton

Tess Hamilton is the Assistant Conservator of Contemporary Art in the Department of Photographs and Time-Based Media Conservation at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Before joining The Met, she was the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation Fellow of Photograph Conservation at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, where she conducted research and characterization of nearly 200 Robert Mapplethorpe prints. She received an MS in the Conservation of Art and Historic Artifacts and an MA in the History of Art and Archaeology from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, and a BA in Art and in English from Yale University. Tess maintains an active photographic practice and has worked in the darkroom for over 17 years.

Benjamin Hett

Benjamin Carter Hett earned a BA at the University of Alberta and a JD at the University of Toronto, practicing litigation in Toronto before obtaining an MA in History from U of T and a PhD in History at Harvard. He has taught at Harvard College and Harvard Law School and, since 2003, at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the author of six books, including The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic (Henry Holt, 2018), winner of the 2019 Vine Award for History and named a best book of the year by The Times of London and the Daily Telegraph. His work The Nazi Menace: Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Road to War (Henry Holt, 2020) was named an Editors’ Choice by The New York Times Book Review. He is presently finishing a book on criminal policing in Nazi Germany.

Yehuda Hyman

Yehuda Hyman is a dancer, playwright, choreographer, actor, and Artistic Director of Mystical Feet Company. Born in Los Angeles to Polish and Russian immigrant parents, he trained in ballet with Tatiana Riabouchinska (Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo) and studied at Maurice Béjart’s MUDRA in Brussels. He performed on Broadway and toured internationally before shifting his focus to playwriting and theater-making. Hyman’s original works have been produced at major theaters including McCarter Theatre, Mark Taper Forum, Theater J, Mixed Blood, and Actors Theatre of Louisville. His honors include the Kennedy Center New American Plays Award and the NEA/TCG Playwright-in-Residence Grant. He holds an MFA in Dance from Sarah Lawrence College and teaches Devised Theater and Advanced Acting at Manhattan School of Music. He lives in Brooklyn.

Adrienne Keller

Adrienne Keller earned a BA from Arizona State University and is an MA candidate in Art History at Hunter College, City University of New York. Specializing in twentieth-century modern art, she combines textual research, interviews, and experiential fieldwork to reexamine modernism in the German Democratic Republic, bringing greater visibility to the artists who shaped it.

Naomi Levinshtein

Naomi is a cleft-affected multidisciplinary artist, advocate, and community organizer. With a background as a professional makeup artist and photographer, she brings a creative lens to her work in advocacy and community building. Over the past year, she has served as the Programs Assistant at myFace, supporting and uplifting individuals and families within the craniofacial community. She is passionate about representation, celebrating difference, and creating spaces where everyone knows they are not alone and can thrive with confidence.

Susan Meiselas

Susan Meiselas is a documentary photographer based in New York. She is the author of Carnival Strippers (1976), Nicaragua (1981), and Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History (1997), among others. Meiselas is well known for her documentation of human rights issues in Latin America, and her photographs are included in North American and international collections. In 1992, she was named a MacArthur Fellow and later received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015). Meiselas has been the President of the Magnum Foundation since 2007, with a mission to expand diversity and creativity in documentary photography.

Paul Messier

Paul Messier is a photograph conservator and researcher whose work centers on the material history of black-and-white prints. He founded Yale’s Lens Media Lab in 2015 and led it for a decade, building partnerships and research programs that advanced the study of photographic materials. Over more than twenty years, he assembled a landmark reference collection of twentieth-century photographic papers, now held by Yale’s Beinecke Library and publicly accessible through Paperbase.xyz. His projects range widely, including co-directing the establishment of a photography conservation department at the State Hermitage Museum between 2010 and 2015.

Kendall Rogers

Kendall Rogers is a current graduate student at Hunter College pursuing an MA in Art History and a Curatorial Certificate. She has a BFA from the University of Georgia. Her current research interests include photography, modernism, and critical approaches to the archive, historiography, and museum studies.

Caroline Rupprecht

Caroline Rupprecht is Professor of Comparative Literature at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of Asian Fusion: New Encounters in the Asian-German Avant-Garde (Peter Lang, 2020); Womb Fantasies: Subjective Architectures in Postmodern Literature, Cinema, and Art (Northwestern University Press, 2013); and Subject to Delusions: Narcissism, Modernism, Gender (Northwestern University Press, 2006). She also translated Unica Zürn’s Surrealist novel Dark Spring (Exact Change, 2000; 2nd ed. 2008). Her next book will focus on European Jewish art and literature after the Shoah.

Stefan Ruiz

Stefan Ruiz studied painting and sculpture before turning to photography. He has taught art at San Quentin State Prison and was the creative director for Colors magazine in 2003. His work has appeared in magazines around the world, including The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and Vogue. His photographs have been exhibited at MARCO, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey; ICP, New York; Photographers’ Gallery, London; Photo España, Madrid; Les Rencontres d’Arles, France; Havana Biennial; and the Contact Photography Festival, Toronto. He has published four monographs including The Factory of Dreams, a book on Mexican soap operas published by Aperture, and Mexican Crime Photographs published by GOST Books.

Kristina Shook

Kristina Shook is a writer and performance artist. A central focus of her work since 2022 is championing and preserving the legacy of her late mother, photographer Melissa Shook, ensuring that her contributions to contemporary photography remain visible to new audiences.

Stephanie Stebich

Stephanie Stebich is the first Executive Director of the Boris Lurie Art Foundation. A German-born American art historian and museum leader, she previously served as Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and as Executive Director of the Tacoma Art Museum, where she led major institutional growth and expansion. Throughout her career, she has championed innovative programming, community engagement, and expanded representation in American art, bringing deep experience in museum leadership to advancing the legacy of Boris Lurie.

Sally Stein

Sally Stein, Professor Emerita at UC Irvine, continues to research and write about the history of photography. Among the topics she pursues are iconic portraits (like Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother” depiction of Florence Thompson) and less famous photographic portraits, as discussed in one chapter of her recent volume of selected essays, Close-ups from Afar (MACK, 2025). Stein has also explored the practice of self-portraiture in her writings on the work of Ken Ohara, Melissa Shook, and Gail Rebhan. For more info, visit sallystein.com.

Camilo José Vergara

Camilo José Vergara is a photographer-ethnographer who uses time-lapse images to chronicle the transformation of urban landscapes across America. Trained as a sociologist, he reaches into the disciplines of architecture, photography, urban planning, history, and anthropology for tools to present the gradual erosion of late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century architectural grandeur in urban neighborhoods, their subsequent neglect and abandonment, and scattered efforts at gentrification. He received a B.A. (1968) in sociology from the University of Notre Dame and an M.A. (1977) in sociology from Columbia University, where he also completed the course work for his Ph.D. His books include Silent Cities: The Evolution of the American Cemetery (1989, with Kenneth Jackson), The New American Ghetto (1995), American Ruins (1999), Unexpected Chicagoland (2001), and Twin Towers Remembered (2001). Vergara was a Revson Fellow at Columbia University (1986-87) and a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute (1996). He received the Robert E. Park Award of the American Sociological Association for The New American Ghetto in 1997. He was awarded a National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama in 2012 and named a MacArthur Fellow in 2002.

Virginia Inés Vergara

Virginia Inés Vergara is a photo-based Chilean-American artist with a studio practice in NYC. She has had solo exhibitions at Robert Miller Gallery, NYC (Shards, 2015–2016); at LA Projects, Madrid (2017); a solo booth at Arco, Madrid (2018); and Hunter East Harlem Gallery, NYC (2021–2022). Her work has been displayed in group shows in New York and abroad, including 205 Hudson Gallery (Hunter College Art Gallery); La Fabbrica del Cioccolato (2019), Switzerland; Barbara Gladstone Gallery, NYC (2018); Magenta Planes, NYC (2018); Carriage Trade Gallery, NYC (2017–2023); and Interstate Projects, Brooklyn (2014). She participated in the first Uptown Triennial, curated by Deborah Cullen at the Wallach Gallery of Columbia University, NYC (2017), and is an En Foco fellow (2019). Her work has been reviewed in Nueva Luz, Brooklyn Rail, The New Yorker, Artforum (Critic’s Pick, 2023), The New York Times, and Financial Times, among others. Her work is in numerous private collections, including a promised gift to MoMA. In 2022, she created her first permanent site-specific installation in Lower Manhattan in collaboration with Elissa Levy, curated by Eileen Jeng Lynch. Vergara's work explores archives, systems of knowledge, and representations of nature. In the works here from the Glass-scapes series, she employs a complex process to photograph museum dioramas, which she then digitally manipulates to explore artificiality and nature transformed into intellectual delectation.