From left to right: Aldeide Delgado (photograph by Melanie Metz); Andrea Nelson (photograph by the National Gallery of Art); Vanessa Rocco (photograph by Southern New Hampshire University).

Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA) announced today that it will open its first WOPHA Congress: Women, Photography, and Feminisms with a conversation between Aldeide Delgado, art researcher, curator, and founder and director of Women Photographers International Archive, and Andrea Nelson, associate curator, department of photographs, National Gallery of Art that will be moderated by Vanessa Rocco, associate professor of humanities and fine art, Southern New Hampshire University.

The conversation, organized by the National Gallery of Art and WOPHA, will explore the divergent and common threads in each woman’s professional chronicling of the innovative work of women photographers, and set the stage for a thought-provoking two-day convening of notable creative, critical, and academic voices on the representation of women in photography.

As founder and director of WOPHA, Delgado advances recognition and research of underrepresented artists, specifically Latinx women, work which inspired Delgado to create the WOPHA Congress.

Nelson’s current exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, The New Woman Behind the Camera was hailed as groundbreaking by critics when it opened this summer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and continues to provoke dialogue about the global phenomenon of the modern New Woman and the groundbreaking impact of women photographers during the 1920s to the 1950s.

Rocco, co-editor of The New Woman International (2011) and author of Photofascism: Photography, Film, and Exhibition Culture in 1930s Germany and Italy (2020), will guide the conversation and draw parallels between the women photographers in the exhibition and those working today, reflecting on shifting definitions of new womanhood.

The WOPHA Congress, co-presented with the Pérez Art Museum Miami, will take place on November 18–19, 2021. It is the first two-day public convening of its kind, providing a platform to celebrate women and an unparalleled network for the international community of women in the photographic arts. Participation includes 50 internationally recognized artists, curators, scholars, and educators from around the world alongside 40 worldwide collectives and organizations of women and nonbinary photographers. The program, which is free and open to all, also includes events and exhibitions at various satellite locations in Miami.

About the Participants

Aldeide Delgado is the founder and director of Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA). She has a background in advising and presenting at art history forums based on photography including, lectures at the Tate Modern, Perez Art Museum Miami, The New School, and California Institute of the Arts. Delgado is a recent recipient of a 2019 Knight Arts Challenge, 2018 School of Art Criticism Fellowship, and a 2017 Research and Production of Critic Essay Fellowship. She is the author of the online archive Catalog of Cuban Women Photographers, as well as the namesake ongoing book. Publications, where she has contributed, include Cuban Art News, Artishock, Terremoto, C&America Latina, Arcadia, as well as diverse independent art blogs. She writes for Artishock, Terremoto, ArtNexus, and C&America Latina. She is an active member of PAMM’s International Women’s Committee, IKT International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art, US Latinx Art Forum, and Art Table.

Andrea Nelson is associate curator in the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. She received her Ph.D. in art history from the University of Minnesota in 2007 and has published on modern and contemporary photography and the history of the photobook. At the National Gallery she has organized several exhibitions and installations including The New Woman Behind the Camera (2021), Richard Mosse: Incoming (cocurator, 2019), The Memory of Time: Contemporary Photographs from the National Gallery of Art (cocurator, 2015), and A Subtle Beauty: Platinum Photographs from the Collection (2014). She also serves as co-chair of the museum’s Time-based Media Art Working Group.

Vanessa Rocco (PhD, Art History, CUNY Graduate Center) is Associate Professor of Humanities and Fine Arts at Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, and former Associate Curator at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York. Her latest book, Photofascism: Photography, Film, and Exhibition Culture in 1930s Germany and Italy, was recently published by Bloomsbury Academic and will be converted to paperback in March 2022. The research was supported in part by a Getty Research Institute Library Grant. She is also co-editor with Elizabeth Otto of The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s to the 1960s (University of Michigan Press, 2011/2012.)