Kinship Connectors
Kinship Photography Collective is a volunteer-run and community supported non-profit project fiscally sponsored by Makers Circle. Kinship Connectors are a team of dedicated volunteers and advisors who work behind the scenes to help guide the Kinship Photography Collective.
Artist in Residence
Kinship’s yearlong virtual artist residency is a unique opportunity for an artist with a strong interest in participatory art, socially engaged practice, or arts-based research to explore new models of creative collaboration. To support our call for engagement the resident artist creates an emergent project that focuses on a subtheme that expands and deepens our call. This years Kinship Artist in Residence is Megan Driving Hawk.
Megan Driving Hawk is an artist/mother/educator using habits of the heart to facilitate connection, healing, and learning through photography, poetry, & traditional needlework. Creatively, she researches collective healing, trauma, memory, and time. Academically, she researches culturally responsive fine arts education.
In this residency, Megan will facilitate a yearlong asynchronous practice group called Rhythm & Ritual for Kinship members. This practice group focuses on how ritual can become a portal through which we access deep time, inhabited time, and time-out-of time simultaneously. Participants will use photography to build new and/or deepen their ongoing ritual practices. Every week in Kinship Circle there will be a photographic prompt inspired by text from an outside source paired with Megan’s poetry. Additionally, participants will find inspiration in short readings and quotes on themes of legacy, seasonal time, memory, ancestral memory, reciprocity, spiritual time, and poetic time. Participating artist will have the opportunity to submit images for a curated collection for the Kinship Photography Collective website.
Megan will also support the Kinship creative ecosystem by hosting artist talks and artist interviews for select weekly Wednesday gatherings.
Leadership Team
Susan Patrice is a documentary photographer and citizen artist. Her photography and public installations focus primarily on the southern landscape and its people and feature intimate images that touch deeply into questions of place and belonging. She lives in Cumberland, MD where she is the director of Makers Circle, a non-profit arts organization and facilitates artist residencies and retreats at Kinship Studio.
Frances Bukovsky (they/them) makes images about the relationships between selfhood, other beings and places, and medical experiences in the context of chronic illness, disability, and queerness. They work in self portraiture, documentary photography, and alternative processes combined with an active research practice to create photography books and other projects that tie systemic issues into personal lives. They currently live in Marshall, North Carolina.
Kaye Savage teaches Environmental Studies at Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC. She is also director of Wofford's Goodall Environmental Studies Center, and manages its Long Term Environmental Reflection creative residency program. Her past research in environmental geochemistry, and her current art practice, are explorations of chemical, physical, and biological interactions across multiple scales of time and space.
Liz Titone photographer and educator whose artistic practice is a continuous dialogue between observation and creation. Naturally curious and equally stubborn, she approaches her work with an insatiable thirst for answers, even when they lead to further questions. Her photography is rooted in patient inquiry and exploration, guided by the belief that observation is a superpower.
Lyn Swett Miller is a lifelong photographer, speaker, teacher, and storyteller based in Quechee, VT and Lebanon, NH, where she explores how to live a meaningful, connected life in a rapidly changing world. Her work is rooted in curiosity, connection, and an unexpected muse: compost. Both literal and metaphoric, compost fuels her ongoing investigations into the healing power of showing up for what you love.
Kate Kennington Steer is a disabled writer, contemplative photographer, and visual artist. Following a residency at the New Ashgate Gallery, Farnham, in 2023 and a bursary from DAiSY (Disability Arts In Surrey), Kate is working on the bright-+/well project: a large series of works, combining photography, printing, painting and poetry examining wellbeing and the built environment.
Paul Wanta, is a photographer, writer and wildlife tracker living in Wendell, Massachusetts. Nature-based imagery is central to his practice. In addition to his photography practice, writing is essential to how he contemplates his relationships with his immediate surroundings. For Paul, the image itself is a showing, and by combining words and images, both are deepened.
Chris Warner-Carey is a photographer living in the coastal community of Half Moon Bay, California. His photographic interests stem from his location on the Pacific Ocean, with its diverse communities of plants, animals, and humans who live, work, and interact with one another. Chris is interested in the history of photography, alternative photographic processes, and would love to have a bigger darkroom.
Mike Belleme is a freelance photographer based in Asheville, North Carolina. His work ranges from long-form documentary, to assignment-based editorial, photojournalism, and portraiture. His practice involves photographing from a space of emotional availability and vulnerability and exploring themes involving connection and disconnection from that space. Belleme is a regular contributor to The New York Times and other clients.
Advisory Team
Casey Visco is an American photographer based in Asheville, NC. Casey first explored photography while attending the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA. Over the years he continued to take occasional photographs, but it wasn’t until the Covid-19 pandemic forced him—along with the rest of the world—to slow down, that he began a deeper practice of making photographs. He’s drawn to the very small and very common things in nature that most people wouldn’t give a second look.
Eric William Carroll’s work on photography, science, and nature explores the differences in how we experience, represent, and organize the world. Through his photographs, installations, and performances, Carroll creates visual and emotional connections that span enormous distances in space and time. At the heart of his practice is a genuine sense of curiosity that questions traditional binary relationships.
Erik Mace is a experimental visual artist who uses photography, graphic design, and book arts as his tools of inquiry. He is deeply curious about the power of photography and adjacent media and how to take advantage of their limitations. His work is connected by a sense of restlessness and joy in expressly matching visual and language-based tools to subject matter. Erik received his BFA in Visual Communications from Washington University in St. Louis and is an alumnus of the Contemporary Photography program at the ICP in New York.
Jon Stuart is a photo-based artist working and living in Ottawa on the unceded territories of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation. Jon uses photography to collect and process delicate evidence to reveal meaning and sublimity in the apparently mundane. His images are rich portrayals of events that played out before the photographer arrived. Each scene contains clues to existence, presence, and place, not merely documenting physical locations but scenes charged with significance. His detailed photographs seek to draw the viewer’s eye from object to subject, shifting their view from a “space on the ground” to a “place in the mind.
Raymond Thompson Jr, is an artist, educator and visual journalist based in Austin, TX. He currently works as an Assistant Professor of Photojournalism at University of Texas at Austin. He has received a MFA in Photography from West Virginia University and a MA in Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin. He also graduated from the University of Mary Washington with a BA in American Studies. He has worked as a freelance photographer for The New York Times, The Intercept, NBC News, NPR, Politico, Propublica, The Nature Conservancy, ACLU, WBEZ, Google, Merrell and the Associated Press.