UNCG School of Art
Portfolio Review

 

MJ Sharp is a documentary and fine arts photographer. She was the staff photographer at the Independent, an award-winning newsweekly in North Carolina, for most of the 1990s while also freelancing regionally for the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, PBS’s Frontline, the Columbia Journalism Review, and the Ford Foundation, among others. She went on to earn her Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2007, when she began extensively photographing night landscapes with vintage large-format bellows cameras. Very long exposures, whether taken by the magic of moonlight or by prosaic household illumination, produce a singular visual vocabulary possible only with slowly accumulating light on film. That vocabulary, in turn, initiates a particular kind of discussion about what we take time to see and experience and what we overlook and disregard. Her work appears in the collections of the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Akron Museum of Art, the Nasher Museum of Art, the Ackland Museum of Art, and the Asheville Museum of Art, as well as private collections such as the Cassilhaus Collection in Chapel Hill, NC. She has been based at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke since 2012, where she enjoys teaching the alchemy of black and white film photography and the rigor of advanced projects to undergraduates.

Lisa McCarty is an image maker, curator, and educator based in Durham, North Carolina. 

Lisa has participated in over 60 exhibitions and screenings at venues such as The Carnegie Museum of Art, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Chicago Photography Center, Houston Center for Photography, Griffin Museum of Photography, Asheville Art Museum, and the American University Museum. Lisa’s photographs have also been shown internationally in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Argentina. Additionally her moving images have been screened at festivals such as the New York Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Experiments in Cinema, Cairo Video Festival in Egypt, Encounters Short Film & Animation Festival in the UK, and Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival in Scotland.

 

Lisa has held curatorial positions in archives, libraries, galleries, and private collections including the Smithsonian American Art Museum Library, the Peace Corps Archive, George Mason University Art Galleries, the Cassilhaus Collection, The Nasher Museum of Art, and The Center for Documentary Studies. Lisa received a MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University and is currently Curator of the Archive of Documentary Arts at Duke University’s Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library as well as an instructor at the Center for Documentary Studies.

 

Lori Vrba is a native Texan now residing in Chapel Hill.  She is a self-taught artist committed to film and the traditional wet darkroom.  Vrba's imagery is rooted in themes of memory, illusion, loss and revival.  Her one-of-a-kind assemblage pieces combine her photography and vintage curiosities.  She considers each piece to be much like an objectified journal entry.  Her solo shows have been met nationally and internationally with great acclaim.  Vrba believes her exhibition installations are an extension of the aesthetic and narrative components of her imagery.  Her work is held in permanent as well as private collections through out the world.  Her first monograph published by Daylight was named one of the top ten photo books of 2015 by American Photo Magazine.

 

Emily Stamey is the Weatherspoon Art Museum's Curator of Exhibitions. Previously she served as Curator of Contemporary Art at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Arizona and as Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Ulrich Museum of Art at Wichita State University in Kansas.

 

Stamey received her Ph.D. from The University of Kansas, Lawrence and completed her undergraduate work at Grinnell College in Iowa. Her curatorial interests are broad: she has presented exhibitions of photographs by Hank Willis Thomas and Gordon Parks, videos by Alfredo Jaar and Kelly Richardson, paintings by Odili Donald Odita and Leslie Shows, and site-specific installations by Tony Feher and Santiago Borja. Her current research focuses on the uses of fairy tales in contemporary art.