Common Ground/CENTER Panel Discussion

About the Artists

Lizzy Cross: Window Peeps 

Lizzy Cross, winner of CENTER’s 2021Personal Award, was born and raised in Palo Alto, CA. She received her BFA in painting with honors from the Rhode Island School of Design and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Long interested in the arts, Cross attended the California State Summer School for the Arts. She was an Artist in Residence at the Vermont Studio Center ion 2005, and attended the CUNY MFA Visual Arts Program in Hunter, NY in 2008-09.  She is currently working on a book chronicling her experiences during a miraculous recovery from a chronic illness.  

I was emerging from a long period of withdrawal from society due to multiple chronic illnesses, freshly divorced, and I had moved back across the country when COVID19 required us all to isolate. But this time, incredibly, the illness was not mine. I was alive and thriving for the first time in nearly a decade. I had healed in miraculous ways, essentially and entirely reborn. Slowly climbing out from severe food allergies and sensitivities, a few simple things prepared at restaurants had just been successfully reintroduced. It was thrilling, it truly opened up my world. I could see friends easily, and enjoy nourishment for the first time—possibly ever.

https://www.lizzycross.com/

Arista Slater-Sandoval: Parable for Hysteria

Arista Slater-Sandoval, winner of CENTER’s 2022 Personal Award, was born and raised in Grand Rapids Michigan.  In 2007, she moved to Washington D.C. to pursue a BFA in photography at the Corcoran College of Art and Design. While there she completed a five-month Teachers Assistance and residency program in New York City at the Center for Alternative Photography. After completing a BFA, she moved to Cambridge MA, and attended the College of Art and Design at Lesley University where she obtained an MFA in Fine Art Photography in 2013. While in grad school she pursued issues in communication, identity, love, and romance thought alternative photographic processes. 

Since moving to Santa Fe in 2016, she teaches full time at the Institute of American Indian Art while balancing studio time. She continues to work in alternative photographic processes and approaches while tackling large issues in feminine and multi-racial representation, domestic spheres, and intimate relationships.

www.aristaslatersandoval.com

Heather Evans Smith: Blue

Heather Evans Smith, winner of CENTER’s 2022 ME&EVE Grant, is a photo-based artist whose work reflects her southern roots, motherhood, womanhood, and a whimsical imagination she relied on as an only child in a rural town. Her photographic imagery explores the ideas of memory, loss, and family in conceptual settings. Smith’s work has been exhibited in both solo and group exhibitions at venues including the Fox Talbot Museum in Lacock, England, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, NC and Leica Galerie Milano in Milan, Italy. She is a Critical Mass 2014, 2018, and 2021 Top 50 recipient as well as a 2022 Silver List artist. Her first monograph, Seen Not Heard, was published by Flash Powder Projects in 2016 followed by her self-published monograph, Alterations, in 2020. She just released a monograph of her Blue series in September 2022. She lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

www.heatherevanssmith.com

Ana Cristina Vallejo: Neuromantic

Ana Cristina Vallejo, winner of CENTER’s 2021 Excellence in Multimedia Award, is an interdisciplinary mixed media artist and conceptual documentary photographer from Colombia; she is currently based in New York. Having a background in biology, Vallejo roots her practice in researching trauma, brain plasticity, and human consciousness.  She incorporates experimental and holistic approaches to investigate the potential that art, social bonds, and collective experiences offer to heal and transcend challenging experiences. She invites sympathy, chance, and collaboration to delve into human perception, memory, and emotions and explore alternative and autonomous ways of portraying reality and subjectivity. 

Growing up with a schizophrenic father, in an anxious family system, and in a country that has normalized war and violence, Vallejo is drawn to how neglect and trauma affect our emotions, mental health, sense of worth, and relationships. She is interested in looking with fresh eyes at marginal communities and psychological states that are often excluded and reduced to stigmas by society, becoming recipients of our fears and projections of the unprocessed parts of ourselves.

Vallejo graduated from the New Media Narratives program at the International Center of Photography in NYC as a recipient of the Mary Ellen Mark Memorial Scholarship and a Director’s Fellowship. Her work has been exhibited in festivals and venues including Photo Vogue Festival (Milan), Ph Museum Days Festival (Italy), Currents New Media Festival (Santa Fe, California), Month of Photgraphy in Los Angeles (MOPLA), Foam (Amsterdarm), Berlin Photo Week, Lumix festival (Germany), and Organ Vida Festival (Croatia). In 2021 she was selected Foam Talent, and earned the 1st prize of The PhMuseum Women Photographers Grant. 

https://www.anacvallejo.com/