Ithaca College

conversation about representation across forms, cultures, and contexts will take place on Thursday, April 7, at 7:00 PM Iger Hall, Whalen Center.

This event brings together a writer and a photographer, offering a public forum for their work and a moderated discussion surrounding issues of representation across forms, the relationship between personal history and creative work, and diverse approaches to narrative construction.

Photographer: Jo Ann Walters is a photographic artist and teacher. Her work is included in major international collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Bibliothéque Nationale, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Center for Fine Photography, Bombay, India. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Friends of Photography's award for outstanding portraiture. In 2002, she received her second Connecticut Commission of the Arts Fellowships as well as support from the Peter S. Reed Foundation Fellowship awarded to distinguished writers, choreographers, filmmakers, and visual artists in their fields. Her work has been included in seminal exhibitions and publications, including New Color/New Work and The Museum of Modern Art's The Pleasure and Terror of Domestic Comfort. She has been on the faculties of the Rhode Island School of Design and Yale University and is currently an associate professor at Purchase College, State University of New York.

Writer: Nalini Jones is a graduate of Columbia University's MFA program (fiction). A recent MacDowell fellow, her first two books are forthcoming from Knopf, a work of non-fiction about her family in India and a collection of short stories tentatively titled St. Cyril Road.

Both Walters and Jones embed their descriptions of character and social relations into a richly and incisively rendered depiction of place. They work very specifically from the texture and landscape of the places they are from, exploring both the loss and recuperation of childhood and home. For Walters, this context is the blue-collar towns of the industrial midwest, along the Mississippi river; for Jones, an Indian Catholic neighborhood outside Mumbai. Across these distinctions of culture, generation and medium, it will be interesting to see the intersections of interest and enquiry that emerge when their distinct works enter into conversation.