Click on name to go to Professor's Website
Christopher McKenzie
Trish Neumyer
Photography Faculty Biographies
Claire Beckett
Assistant Professor, Photography
M.F.A., Massachusetts College of Art
B.A., Kenyon College, Gambier, OH
From 2002-2004, Claire Beckett worked as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the
Republic of Benin, West Africa, where she focused on HIV/AIDS prevention and
Girls' Education initiatives. Beckett's photographs have been exhibited at the
Photographic Resource Center in Boston, at the College Art Association's
Regional MFA Exhibition, and at the Herra Gallery in Wakefield, RI. Beckett’s
studio practice focuses on large-format environmental portraiture. She is
represented by the Boston Drawing Project at the Bernard Toale Gallery. For
2007, she has solo exhibitions scheduled at the University of Rhode Island and
at the Bernard Toale Gallery. She is currently photographing young army soldiers
going through basic training in preparation for deployment to Iraq. She writes
that, “I am deeply moved by the notion of these people who face war. The
ongoing nature of the conflict in Iraq ensures that each soldier will likely be called
for mobilization, some for a second or third time.†The people she photographs
are mostly part-time American Army National Guard or ROTC soldiers in
Massachusetts. Since 2004 she has been making photographs during their
training exercises, typically spending monthly drill weekends with the soldiers.
National Guard soldiers often call themselves M-Day or Mobilization-Day
soldiers, referring to the day that one leaves home for military deployment.
Beckett’s photographs deal with this anticipation of war, and with each portrait
she is asking the viewer to consider the humanity of an individual soldier.
www.clairebeckett.com
Thomas Gustainis
Assistant Professor, Photography
M.F.A., School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
B.F.A., Savannah College of Art and Design
Thomas Gustainis received his BFA from the Savannah College of Art and
Design, Savannah, GA, and his MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston in 2003. He has worked for the Polaroid Collections and boasts his
own active commercial practice with clients such as British Petroleum and
TASCHEN. His work is actively exhibited and is represented in Boston by
Gallery Kayafas. Gustainis’s work often confronts and challenges our notion of
what is real and fabricated, be it narrative artistic genres, or the nature of
photography itself.
www.gustainisphotography.com
Molly Lamb
Adjunct Professor, Photography
B.A., University of Massachusetts
Molly Lamb grew up in Tennessee, has lived and worked in Minnesota and
Vermont, and is now based in Boston. Her work focuses on the details of life and
is greatly influenced by the places she's lived and her background in
documentary photography. Teaching young people is also an important part of
her work. She teaches photography at the Boys and Girls Club of Charlestown
and works as an Artist in Residence at the University of Massachusetts in
Boston.
www.mollylamb.com
Jared Leeds
Adjunct Professor, Photography
B.A., Boston University
Jared Leeds graduated from Boston University with a degree in Journalism and
minors in Photojournalism and English. Since then, he has gone on to pursue
fine art, editorial and commercial work. He started off as a working as a news
photographer. His work has been published in Boston Magazine, Bicycling
Magazine, Chicago Magazine, Newsweek, The New York Times, People and
Forbes, and his clients include The Ford Foundation, Harvard, The Federal
Reserve Bank of Boston, Tufts Health Plan and XXL to name a few. He is most
interested in photographing people and their environments. He has been
working as a Boston-based freelance photographer for over seven years. He
maintains his own studio in the Fort Point Channel area.
www.jaredleeds.com
Liz Linder
Liz Linder makes photographs that are accessible and at the same time
refreshingly unique. Liz has been a photographer with her own studio for over 20
years. She has photographed well-known musical artists like Aerosmith, Jimmy
Buffett, and Carly Simon as well as indie and emerging artists such as Letters to
Cleo, Howie Day, and the North Mississippi Allstars. She has also worked with
corporations such as John Hancock, EMC and Millenium Pharmaceuticals; and
with institutions like Harvard University, MIT and Berklee College of Music. Her
commercial work has appeared in dozens of leading publications, including
Rolling Stone, The New York Times and People Magazine. She's even appeared
on On Point Public Radio and ABC World News Tonight. Her personal work is
exhibited and collected throughout the U.S. and Europe.
www.lizlinder.com
Christopher McKenzie
Assistant Professor, DVFP and Photography
M.F.A., American University
B.A., Rice University
Chris McKenzie works as a freelance videographer and editor in Boston. Before
moving to film and video, he worked in print journalism for six years, primarily as
a graphic designer, photographer and photo editor. He never completely got
over working in journalism and remains a news junkie to this day. He taught film
and video at colleges and universities around Washington, C.C. for three years.
He was Director of Photography for two feature-length narrative projects, edited
two others, and served as production manager on another. He produced and
edited a music video that was nominated for the 2004 Headbanger’s Ball Best
Video of the Year. He continues to work on narrative and documentary projects
in both the Boston area and his home state, Oklahoma. He has also worked as
a software tester for Avid Technology. On occasion, he dabbles in acting; this
summer, he starred in a play called “Gin, Love and Kerouac,†which was staged
in Cambridge by the Peripitus Theater Company. His acting coach, Bridget
O’Leary, just happens to be his wife; she is a graduate student in the theater
directing program at Boston Univerisity.
www.leaningtreeproductions.com
Bruce Myren
Assistant Professor, Photography
M.F.A., University of Connecticut
B.F.A., Massachusetts College of Art
Bruce Myren started his photographic career at age 16 with a job at his
hometown newspaper. Bruce has exhibited at numerous venues, including the
annual juried exhibition at the Photographic Resource, Laconia Gallery,
Panopticon Gallery, and the Artists Foundation. His recent exhibitions include,
Lillian Immig Gallery at Emmanuel College, Roadside Attractions at the Arts
Council of Greater New Haven, and the solo debut of his work at Gallery
Kanakas. In addition, he was a part of Landscape: Fact and Fiction at the William
Benton Museum of Art at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. Although he
shoots most of his personal work with his 8 x 10 Deardorff camera, Bruce has
always been at the forefront of digital imaging technology. He started the digital
imaging room at the professional camera store, E.P. Levine, Inc., in 1996, where
he was the “Digital Evangelist†for 4 years. He has taught at the Center for Digital
Imaging Arts at Boston University, served as the US tech rep for Eyelike medium
format digital backs (now Sinar), and was a digital mentor for American Photo
Magazine’s Mentor Series. Bruce started his own freelance company,
BeeDigital, in 1999 and continues today to help photographers, art directors, and
publishing houses navigate the digital world.
www.brucemyren.com
Tricia Neumyer
Assistant Professor, Photography
M.F.A., School of the Museum of Fine Arts
B.F.A., Massachusetts College of Art
Tricia Neumyer is a freelance photographic production specialist. She works with
various clients in the Boston area including Jim Rohan Imaging, The
Photographic Resource Center, Tim Gillman Worldwide, and The Boston Photo
Collaborative. She is a fine art photographer and an Artist’s bookmaker, using a
wide variety of techniques and equipment. Her work has been exhibited at the
Boston Athenaeum, Aidekman Arts Center at Tufts University and the Danforth
Museum of Art in Framingham.
Dan O’Connor
Adjunct Professor, Photography
M.F.A., Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI
B.F.A., SUNY
Dan O’Connor takes his interest in the narrative possibilities of multiple
photographs and combined it with his interest in the interactions of man and
nature. His works are built not only in nature and from nature, but also with
various methods of assembling the photographs. The photographs create their
own structure and language for viewing the photographic content. There is an
investigation of man’s ability to be at once a part of nature and separate from it.
His Commercial work combines his artistic vision and applies it to other subject
matter such as portraiture, architecture and landscape photography. There is a
constant attention to detail and a respect for the medium of photography. He
uses all the current forms photography to create his images; using medium
format film cameras, digital cameras, and Photoshop to arrive at finished images.
www.stickphoto.com
Sejal Petal
Assistant Professor, Photography
M.F.A., Syracuse University
B.F.A., Massachusetts College of Art
Sejal Petal is a successful fine art photographer who has been exhibiting her
work for nine years. She also works freelance in digital image manipulation and
color correction. In her artwork, she constructs a life in an unfamiliar land in an
effort to make herself a great performer, using her body and behavior in a
particular way simply to reconstruct the existing space. She uses photography
as a means to distill experiences in a frame that becomes much like a page in a
diary. In making a still image of her real experience she is trying to distill
imaginative participation vs. physical participation. She allows her audience to
logically interpret and recreate the space and time of the ‘original’ performance.
In the context of contemporary society, her self-portraits became a search for
self-definition and the other, where she, as a person or an artist, act as a
negotiator between public and private. As a result of such unconscious behavior,
she has now come to be classified as an Orientalist artist and the subject of her
Photography Department Orientation Winter 2010 21
work as Oriental. Having spent most of her life in America, she sees herself as
the cultural informant who practices Orientalism as a defense mechanism
towards issues that she cannot resolve for her “oriental†self. She dominates her
eastern origin by becoming prone to the occidental way of seeing her own
culture.
www.petalsejal.com
Camilo Ramirez
Adjunct Professor, Photography
M.F.A., Massachusetts College of Art
B.F.A., Florida International University
Camilo Ramirez was born in Santa Monica, California. He received a BFA in
Photography from Florida International University in 2001 and a Master of Fine
Art from Massachusetts College of Art in 2006. He has been included in
numerous group shows throughout Florida and the Boston area. He also works
as a freelance graphic designer as well as a computer & digital-photography
consultant. He is currently a member of the adjunct faculty at Massart and
Emerson College. Camilo continues to photograph and work in Jamaica Plain,
MA.
www.camramirez.com
Irina Rozovsky
Adjunct Professor, Photography
M.F.A., Syracuse University
B.F.A., Massachusetts College of Art
Irina Rozovsky was born in Moscow and moved to Boston with her parents in
1989. She studied French and Spanish and Tufts University and completed her
M.F.A. in photography at Massachusetts College of Art in 2007. Her work has
been included in numerous group exhibitions including 25 Under 25: Up and
Coming Photographers at the Tisch School of the Arts in New York City and
published in the accompanying catalogue published by Duke University.
Recently, she had a solo exhibition, Of Birds and Men, at the Carpenter Center,
Harvard University.
www.irinar.com
Rachelle A. Dermer
Professor, Department Chair, Photography
Ph.D., M.A., Boston University
B.F.A., Arizona State University
Rachelle Dermer is an artist and a scholar working with and studying lens-based
media. Dermer earned her B.F.A. in photography from Arizona State University
where she studied with Tamarra Kaida, Bill Jay, James Hajicek and Mark Klett.
Her contemporary landscape studies are heavily influenced by the work of Klett
and the re-photographic project. Interested in further studying contemporary
theory in conjunction with photography and other lens-based media, Dermer
Photography Department Orientation Winter 2010 22
opted to pursue a Ph.D. at Boston University. Her dissertation, Photographic
Objectivity and the Construction of the Medical Subject in the United States
(2002), explores the intertwined histories of medicine and photography. Her
published writing includes an article in the Autumn, 1999 issue of the journal,
History of Photography on the theme, “Medicine and Photography,†for which she
also served as invited guest-editor. Dermer remains intent on defining a career
that includes artistic production in conjunction with scholarly endeavors. After
completing her dissertation, she returned her focus to making art as her primary
commitment. Using digital photography and video, Dermer uses personal
narrative as a way of exploring subjectivity and identity. She documents her
experiences in order to interrogate intersubjectivity as it is both evidenced and
eradicated by the lens. Her solo exhibitions include Myths of Freedom at the
Clark University Art Gallery and the Marran Gallery at Lesley University. She is
also a filmmaker and has screened her films at a number of venues. Recently,
her film, Commit to the Line, was an official selection at the Rhode Island
International Film Festival where it won the First Prize Providence Film Festival
Award.
www.rachelleadermer.com.