Publishing Cohorts

Cohort #1

(2023-2025)

Learn more about our collective publishing structure here.

Cecil McDonald, Jr. 

I am most interested in the intersections of masculinity, familial relations, and the artistic and intellectual pursuits of black culture, particular as this culture intersects with and informs the larger culture. Through photography, video, and dance/performance, I seek to investigate and question the norms and customs that govern our understanding of each other, our families, and the myriad of societal struggles and triumphs. I studied fashion, house music and dance club culture before receiving a MFA in Photography at Columbia College Chicago, where I currently serve as an adjunct professor and a teaching artist at the Center for Community Arts Partnership at Columbia College Chicago. My work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, with works in the permanent collection of The Cleveland Museum of Art, Chicago Bank of America LaSalle Collection, and Museum of Contemporary Photography. I was awarded the: Joyce Foundation Midwest Voices & Visions Award, the Artadia Award, The Swiss Benevolent Society, Lucerne, Switzerland Residency and the 3Arts Teaching Artist Award. I participated in Light Work’s Artist-in-Residence program in July 2013. In 2016 the first edition of my monograph In The Company of Black was published and was shortlisted by the Aperture Foundation for the 2017 First PhotoBook Award.

The Heat of the Cool (January 2023) 

The Heat of the Cool emerged from a theory that espouses the idea that cool or coolness is a West African phenomenon where its inhabitants mask a deep wellspring of intensity, stress, or pleasure with serenity, calmness, or spirituality. Believing in the transformative power of dance I create, parties, dances, and occurrences of movement, where participants (dancers) and collaborators (DJs, still and motion photographers) converge. From these events, I create large-scale photographs and time-based imagery that renders the moving, dancing body as a symbol of freedom, with the ability to express the ownership of one’s time, space, labor, and self.

This multidiscipline project places at its center the photograph and the depiction of the moving, dancing body, as a divine symbol of freedom, with its own understanding of time, sometimes improvised, sometimes instructive. The body in motion is a lexicon of communication. The ecstatic experiences found in music and dance can be considered a momentary connection to the divine.

Purchase here.

Jonathan Pivovar

Jonathan Pivovar is a photographer and digital technician, living and working in-between Brooklyn and Chicago.

K / N / E / U / N (July 2023)

K/N/E/U/N is a photographic record of the annual Bristol Bay, Alaska salmon run, documented over 8 seasons. The land, the industry, and its workers are violent, peaceful, resilient, vulnerable: and often misunderstood. Men, boys, women, and girls, labor and rest in sustained shifts against a volatile seascape. Ideas of masculinity thrive and contend with the reality of a life spent, chosen or otherwise, on the open sea.

Purchase here.

River Coello

River Coello (they/them) is a storyteller and changemaker. With a focus on inclusion, River has spoken on themes of intersectionality and justice at prestigious universities and various organizations in North America and Europe.

They hold fellowships from Lambda Literary, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the New Leaders Council, Education Pioneers, and the Helmsley Charitable Trust. They are a graduate of the Universities of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Chicago, and Ohio. They are based out of Orlando, Florida, where they are growing as a social researcher and deepening their creative practice. They are proudly Andean (Ecuadorian-American), qhariwarmi (two-spirit), and disabled.
Recognition for HAMPI: 
  • 2024 Finalist (Bilingual Poetry), International Latino Book Awards
  • 2024 Gold Medalist (Specialty Poetry), Independent Publisher Book Awards

HAMPI (February 2024) 

With bookends of a lunar calling and an earthly reminder, HAMPI chronicles a fantastical journey of recovering one’s buried parts to embrace the blessings of ancestral medicine. Concocted between the United States, Ecuador, and Peru, its photography captures the beauty of these heart homes. Its writing in English, Spanish, and Quechua features lessons from sacred guides, gone ancestors, and other loved ones on the journey to a fuller kind of bravery.

Recognition for HAMPI: 

 

Purchase here.

 

Nykelle DeVivo

Nykelle DeVivo (they/them) is a Southern California visual artist working with light through various mediums to navigate the crossroads between the physical world and that of their ancestors. They studied theory & photography at the San Francisco Art Institute before becoming an inaugural Google Image Equity Fellow, internationally exhibiting their work and having their photographs acquired by permanent museum collections across the country. Nykelle is currently working on publishing their first monograph while pursuing their MFA in visual art from the University of California San Diego, where they expect to graduate in 2025.


Tha Crossroads (Spring 2025)

Raised in a deeply religious household and honoring the language of Afro Spiritualism, my images reflect lifetimes of reverence for the divine. Throughout the diaspora (and from antiquity to our futures), we’ve relied on the ancient technology of refracted light as a tool for divination, which, with intentionality, can be used to embody (or catch) holy spirits. Reversing the limitations of freezing time in which the photographic flash was invented, I cast light as a form of expansion, an act of calling in. The light of my strobe intends to activate the spirit that lay dormant in the reflective surface of Black skin, in the water that gives us life, or in the manufactured sequin suits I don as a form of ritualistic dance.

The shine of Spirit is made brighter through the contrast of the void that saturates much of my work. In the West, the void is seen as a form of lack; in the African context, it’s the vessel for potentiality. Blackness proves its own futurity, and my images are a form of conversation between the ancestors who were and the ones who will be. My practice is a prayer. I photograph people I love as spirit must be held with care. I photograph myself as a means of understanding myself. I photograph objects/spaces of power to understand their nature in our becoming. I bring all to the crossroads for clarity. I bring all to the crossroads as an offering.

"Pray and we pray and we pray
And we pray and we pray
Every day, every day, every day, every day
And we pray and we pray
And we pray and we pray"

—'Tha Crossroads' by Bone Thugs-N-Harmony

 

 

Sara J. Winston

Sara J. Winston is an artist based in New York. She works with photographs, text, and the book form to describe and respond to chronic illness and its ongoing impact on her body, mind, family, and memory. Sara is the author of several photobooks, among them Foibles & Avoidance (National Monument Press, 2024), Shades (Push Pull Editions, 2023), A Lick and a Promise (Candor Arts, 2017) and Homesick (Zatara Press, 2015).

Sara is an Artist in Residence and Photography Program Coordinator at Bard College; on the faculty and 2025 Acting Chair of the Penumbra Foundation Long Term Photobook Program; a contributor to Lenscratch and the Photo Eye Blog where she writes about photobooks; and a member of Storm King Art Center‘s Accessibility Advisory Group.

On June 29, 2023, her long-term project about multiple sclerosis care, Our body is a clock, was adapted and published as an op-ed in the New York Times, titled ‘My body is a clock’: The Private Life of Chronic Care.

 

Sugar Honey Iced Tea (Summer 2025) 

I had a child. I opened a door. I heard a secret. I said a prayer. I wished on a star. I kissed you goodnight.
 
Sugar Honey Iced Tea is a series of image and text one-page-books* contained in a box. Each book contemplates the pace of a life spent nursing an infant, caring for a sick body, hoping for a more equitable future, waiting for the sun to rise, and other topics.