Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA) and Lucie Foundation announced today a special Lucie Talks conversation with WOPHA Founder & Director Aldeide Delgado; artist, Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at New York University – Tisch School of Arts Deborah Willis, and award-winning documentary photographer and Lucie Honoree Maggie Steber. Following the idea of “a room of one’s own,” Delgado will explore the artists’ creative practice including recent projects, academic work, and feminist practice.

The conversation takes place in the lead up to the first-ever WOPHA Congress: Women, Photography, and Feminisms at which worldwide organizations of women photographers, internationally-recognized art historians, curators, and artists from more than 15 countries, including Steber and Willis, will convene in Miami on November 18–19, 2021 to build upon and better represent the history and contributions of women photographers from the 19th century to date.

About the Participants

Aldeide Delgado is the founder and director of Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA). She is also an art historian and curator who has lectured on photography at the Tate Modern, Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), The New School, and California Institute of the Arts. Delgado is a recipient of a 2019 Knight Arts Challenge Award, 2018 School of Art Criticism Fellowship by SAPS-LT, and a 2017 Research and Production of Critic Essay Fellowship by Teor/éTica. Her areas of scholarly interest include a feminist and decolonial re-reading of the history of photography and abstraction from the Latin American, the Caribbean, and Latinx contexts. She is the author of the online archive Catalog of Cuban Women Photographers and is currently working on a related book, which collates, for the first time, the works of Cuban women photographers from the 19th century to the present. She frequently contributes to international publications, including Artishock, Terremoto, and C& América 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.

Maggie Steber, born and raised in Texas, is a documentary photographer who has lived and worked all over the world. Early in her career she worked as a reporter and photographer for the Galveston Daily News and as a picture editor for the Associated Press in New York. Maggie’s photos have appeared in magazines around the world, including Life, the New Yorker, National Geographic Magazine, Smithsonian, People, Newsweek, Time, and Sports Illustrated as well as Merian Magazine of Germany, and The Times Magazine of London, among others. Her work in Haiti won Maggie two major grants (the Ernst Haas Grant and the Alicia Patterson Foundation Grant for Journalistic Exploration of a Subject) and culminated in 1991 in the publication of a book, Dancing on Fire: Photographs from Haiti. Maggie has also won the World Press Foundation Award, the Leica Medal of Excellence, an Overseas Press Club honor, and Pictures of the Year awards. She has served as a judge for many photo competitions, including the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) Pictures of the Year competition. Steber’s work for National Geographic has included articles on Miami, the African slave trade, the Cherokee Nation, soldiers’ letters, and Dubai. Maggie currently lives in Miami, Florida. She was selected as a National Geographic Magazine Woman of Vision in 2013.

Deborah Willis, PhD, is University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She is the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the author of The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship and Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present, co-author The Black Female Body: A Photographic History among others. Professor Willis’s curated exhibitions include: “Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits” at the International Center of Photography; Out of Fashion Photography: Framing Beauty at the Henry Art Gallery and “Reframing Beauty: Intimate Moments” at Indiana University.