Keynote Speakers

KEYNOTE #1:

What Does Photography Mean to Me?

Photographer/ film maker, Jillian Edelstein's work has been published and shown internationally. The National Portrait Gallery have added more than 100 of her portraits to their Collection. In 2018 she was voted onto the ‘Hundred Heroines’ list of international women transforming photography today. Exhibited at The Photographers' Gallery, Imperial War Museum, Les Rencontres Internationales Arles, Robben Island Museum, South Africa, Dali International Festival, China, National Library of Lithuania, Riga. Her book Truth and Lies about the Apartheid legacy received the John Kobal Book Award, in 2003. Here and There was published in 2024. Other awards incl: Honorary Fellowship RPS, Kodak UK Young Photographer of the Year, Photographers' Gallery Portrait Photographer of the Year, Visa d’Or, Perpignan 1997, European Art Polaroid Award, AI-AP, Latin American Fotografia, World Press Awards, LensCulture Portrait, Portrait of Humanity, Julia Margaret Cameron Awards. Portrait of Britain. Her feature doc film, the Water Rats about a group of cold water swimmers during Lockdown won 3 Impact Awards. She is in the final edit of her feature doc about Norman Wexler, the BiPolar afflicted, Academy Award nominated American screenwriter.

KEYNOTE #2:

Matilda Moore: Photographer of Civil War Era New Yorkers

Dr. Katherine Manthorne is a Professor Emerita of art history at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She committed to the study of the art of the Americas (1800-1940) in its hemispheric dimensions. Landscape imagery is a special passion, embodied in publications from Tropical Renaissance. North American Artists Exploring Latin America, 1839-1879 (1989) and Traveler Artists: Landscapes of Latin America from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection (2015) to California Mexicana: Missions to Murals, 1820 to 1930 (2017) and The Rockies and the Alps: Bierstadt, Calame and the Romance of the Mountains (2017). The Caribbean figures in Fern Hunting Among These Picturesque Mountains. Frederic Edwin Church in Jamaica (2010); Nueva York (2010); and Caribbean Crossroads (2012).

Working toward the internationalization of American art, she taught courses at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark; Ca’ Foscari, University of Venice, Italy; and the Freie Universität, Berlin; and co-organized transnational conferences including Landscape Art of the Americas: Sites of Human Intervention Across the Nineteenth Century at the Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia (2021).

Women’s contributions to visual culture constitutes another theme in her work featured in two books: Women in the Dark: American Female Photographers 1850-1900 (2020) and Restless Enterprise: The Art and Life of Eliza Pratt Greatorex (2020).

Intermediality is another interest explored in Film and Modern American Art: The Dialogue Between Cinema and Painting (2019). She received fellowships from Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Fulbright and Smithsonian Institution. Currently projects include Sweet Fortunes: Sugar Plantations, Art Collecting and Enslaved Labor; and Fidelia Bridges: Between Fine Art & Popular Culture.