Our Team
Vanessa Leroy, Curatorial
Vanessa Leroy is a 24-year-old photographer from Waltham, Massachusetts. She is currently completing her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She remains on the hunt for new ways of seeing, remembering, and altering the world through photography. She is drawn to image-making because of the power it holds to create nuanced representation for marginalized people and uplift their stories. She sees photography as a tool for social justice, and with it, she hopes to create worlds that people feel as though they can enter and draw from, as well as provide a look into an experience that they may not personally recognize.
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Mallory Pearson, Features Editor
Mallory Pearson is a 23 year-old artist and writer based in Queens, NY. She focuses on creating work in the realm of painting, design, book arts, and poetry, embracing a range of mixed media to build a tactile experience. She received a BFA with a major in Painting and a minor in Book Arts from Pratt Institute, where she created her thesis collection, A Witch Drinks Black Water. She portrays themes of folklore, the occult, femininity, sexuality, and loss, and how these elements interact with the southern United States.
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Joshua Gutierrez, Contributing Editor
Joshua Gutierrez (he/him) is a photo-based artist and educator living and working in Arizona. He received his MFA in Photography from Arizona State University in 2019. His MFA show, Seeing Being Seen, presented a multi-media exploration of Phoenix’s LGBTQ+ community influenced by the intersection of queer signaling and cell-phone culture. In addition to interests in portraiture and queer material culture, Joshua’s practice is motivated by a desire to understand photography’s connection to materiality and memory. Joshua’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States and was recently featured by The Hopper Prize, for which he was selected as a finalist in 2020.
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Jon Bakos, Contributing Editor
Jon Bakos (b. 1986) is a photographer who makes work that mines the history of photography, vernacular imagery and the role of preserved spaces in contemporary society. He holds a BFA from Lesley Art and Design (formerly the Art Institute of Boston). He has exhibited in venues including the Maine Media Workshops, the University of New England Gallery, and the Trustman Art Gallery at Simmons College. Jon lives and works in Somerville, Massachusetts and is currently the Photography Lab Manager at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Follow Jon on Instagram.
Matthew Klos, Handmade Book Designer
Matthew Klos was born on the North Shore of Massachusetts to a family of artisans. He spent his childhood exploring the galleries of the Isabella Gardner Museum. Matthew's work focuses on the representation of the disabled body, art history, and the evidence of the artist's hand. Loving everything handmade, Matthews's photographic process is entirely analog. He exclusively shoots film and his printing methods of choice are rooted in 19th-century processes such as platinum/palladium and silver gelatin. He also works extensively in mixed media including lifecasting using solid lead, custom artist books, and woodworking. Matthew holds a BFA in photography from the Art Institute of Boston and an MFA in Photography and Integrated Media with a concentration in mixed media from Lesely Unversity College of Art and Design. Follow Matthew on Instagram.