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SAIC Photography Department

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10/09/2026

Introducing Deyi (Evelyn) Zeng (Deyi (Evelyn) Zeng｜增德怡 ), our next featured second-year MFA Photography student.

Deyi (Evelyn) Zeng (b. 2003) is a Chinese visual artist from Beijing based in Chicago. She received her BA in Media Arts Production from Emerson College and is pursuing an MFA in Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Through photography, installation, and archival materials, she examines how illness and migration affect a person’s sense of identity and home. Her work imagines a time before memory takes shape, when experiences the mind cannot recall may already have left their traces in the body.

Her work has been exhibited at Heaven Gallery and the Zhou B Art Center in Chicago, the University of Arkansas School of Art in Fayetteville, Echo & Frame Art Space in Shanghai, and Beijing’s 798 Art District.

09/30/2026

2nd Year Grad Feature: Yunan Xiang✨ Yunan雨

Yunan Xiang is a Chicago-based photographer and interdisciplinary artist pursuing an MFA in Fine Art Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work engages with social and political issues, examining how systems of power shape collective memory, public narratives, and individual experience. Working across photography, archives, and mixed media, she is particularly interested in the circulation and manipulation of information, and in the tensions between personal memory and larger social histories.

09/28/2026

Next Monday, October 5th, we’re thrilled to welcome Pixy Liao for our first Parlor Room artist talk of the academic year! Join us from 6:00–7:00 pm in Sharp Room 327 for a talk and Q&A with Pixy. Everyone in the SAIC community is welcome.

Pixy Liao is an artist originally from Shanghai, China, and currently based in Tokyo. Her work has been exhibited internationally at the Art Institute of Chicago, Fotografiska, Rencontres d’Arles, Asia Society, and the National Gallery of Australia, among others.

Liao is a Guggenheim Fellow and has received the NYFA Fellowship in Photography, the Santo Foundation Individual Artist Award, and the Madame Figaro Women Photographers Award. Her residency history includes Light Work, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, University of the Arts London, the School of Visual Arts, Pioneer Works, and the Camera Club of New York.

08/31/2026

A look back at Sensitivity & Exposure this summer☀️

Students moved between photography and printmaking, experimenting with photogravure, alternative photographic processes, sensitized surfaces, and a range of substrate. Through process tests, proofs, and material experimentation, the course became a testing ground for developing new approaches to imagemaking. Led by Frances Lightbound and Monika Niwelinska, the course culminated in self-directed projects bringing together the processes and ideas explored throughout the session.

05/15/2026

Congratulations to our 2026 MFA cohort on their upcoming graduation and two incredible thesis shows. 🎓

05/07/2026

TODAY at 5 PM join us for a virtual artist talk and Q&A with Sara Cwynar! Link to Zoom in Bio!

Sara Cwynar (Vancouver, BC, 1985) lives and works in New York. Her work in photography, video, and installation involves a constant archiving and re-presentation of collected visual materials. For over 10 years, she has been evolving her own personal visual language in installation, photography, and film, revealing the powerful role that images play in our daily lives. Tapping into personal and collective desires, she explores how visual culture both reflects and shapes notions of beauty, value, and truth. Her work reflects an obsessive curiosity about images: how and why they are created, how they act, how they multiply, endure, and disappear. Using dated and contemporary commercial images, she exposes the failure, with time, of the visual trickery and the waning of the seductive powers of popular images, and the way the images that once seduced are replaced with new ones in increasingly rapid cycles. She tries to think about who all this material is really for, what latent power dynamics are contained by our images, and how contemporary concepts of freedom, agency, and power are tied up and reproduced in images.

05/01/2026

Please join us in welcoming Kelli Connell to the Photography Department & the SAIC community!

We are thrilled to announce that Kelli will be teaching the PHOTO Senior Studio Seminar and the Graduate Photography Seminar this fall.

Kelli Connell is an artist whose work investigates sexuality, gender, identity, and photographer-sitter relationships. Her work is held in the collections of major institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, among others.

Her publications include Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis, PhotoWork: Forty Photographers on Process and Practice, Photo Art: The New World of Photography, and the monograph Kelli Connell: Double Life. Connell has received fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, MacDowell, PLAYA, Peaked Hill Trust, LATITUDE, Light Work, and the Center for Creative Photography.

We are so excited to welcome Kelli and look forward to all that she will bring to our community this fall.

portrait by Natalie Krick

04/23/2026

Join us next week on May 1st for our first year photography MFA students’ artist talks. Room 216 in the 280 building. Good luck grads!

04/17/2026

We are beyond thrilled to celebrate two extraordinary members of our Photo community!

✨ Huge congratulations to Aspen Mays (SAIC Photo MFA 2009) and Guanyu Xu (SAIC Photo BFA 2016 & MFA 2019) on receiving 2026 Guggenheim Fellowships!

This remarkable honor recognizes individuals with exceptional creative ability in the arts and is awarded to those who have demonstrated distinguished accomplishment and extraordinary potential for future achievement.

Awarded annually since 1935 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the fellowship remains one of the most prestigious recognitions for artists, scholars, and thinkers.

We are so excited to see Aspen and Guanyu’s visionary practices celebrated on this national stage. Their work continues to inspire our students, alumni, and the broader field of contemporary photography.

Please join us in congratulating them!

04/08/2026

ALTERATIONS Opening this Friday, April 10 5-8PM
Hard Return Gallery (HARD RETURN ART)
Fine Arts Building, 410 S Michigan Ave, Room 306, Chicago
A collaborative group exhibition with students from Advanced Black and White class, exploring the medium as site-specific practice: each artist bringing a different way of experiencing the same space.
On view through April 20
Participating artists:
Ollie Balbier (ollie :p)
Matthew K. Beeny
Jacob Andres Fuller (jazcorn)
Jin Lee (Jin Leejazcornia Lethin (SJin Lee
Zing Li (Ziying LSaskiahori Ortega Ziying Li
Tanya Shah (tanyasahori
Ananya Vinayatanya shahAnanya)
Autumn Thomas (AuAnanyahomas)
Ravi VietrAutumn Thomaso)
James Wu ()
Galit Aloni (Galit Aloni)
Come celebratGalit Aloni

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1310-1/2B Chicago Ave
Evanston, IL
60201

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