Artist Panel | Manifest Destiny

The Griffin Museum is pleased to host an artist panel for the exhibition Manifest Destiny. Please join us in-person to hear from the artists Craig Easton, Drew Leventhal, Lisa Elmaleh, Rich Frishman, and Vicky Sambunaris, who will share with us the creative process behind their works.

The artist panel will be followed by a reception for the exhibition.

About the artists:

Craig Easton's work is deeply rooted in the documentary tradition. He shoots long-term documentary projects exploring issues around social policy, identity, culture and community. Known for his intimate portraits and expansive landscape, his work regularly combines these elements with reportage approaches to storytelling, often working collaboratively with others to incorporate words, pictures and audio in a research-based practice that weaves a narrative between contemporary experience and history.

In 2021, Easton was awarded the prestigious title of Photographer of the Year at the SONY World Photography Awards and in 2022 was recognised with an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society. His prints are widely collected by private individuals & corporations and are held in important museum collections and archives including the FC Barcelona Collection, the St. Andrews University Special Collections, Hull Maritime Museum and Salford University Art Collection. Easton is a regular visiting lecturer at universities and runs workshops both in the UK and internationally.

Drew Leventhal (b. 1995) is a photographer from the United States. His practice is informed by his upbringing and training in anthropology. Through photography, Drew sees the possibility for connection and mutual understanding. Each image becomes an ongoing dialogue and search for meaning. Through investigations of ritual, colonial history, and the delineations of landscape, Drew is interested in what it means to be human.Drew received a BFA in Anthropology from Vassar College and received an MFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design. He has shown work at galleries and museums across the United States. He has been a finalist for the Aperture Portfolio Prize, the Film Photo Award, and the PhMuseum Grant. Drew won the 2022 Lenscratch Student Prize and was previously a National Geographic Young Explorer. He is currently a 2025-2026 Fulbright scholar in Ireland.

Lisa Elmaleh (b. 1984, Miami, Florida) is a photographer, activist, and humanitarian. She specializes in large-format work in tintype, glass negative, and celluloid film. Her most recent body of work, Promised Land/Tierra Prometida, focuses on migration at the border of the United States and Mexico, and since 2020, she has been immersed in the migrant justice community there. Elmaleh's images have been exhibited internationally. Her work has been exhibited nationwide and recognized by the Guggenheim Foundation, the Arnold Newman Prize, and the Aaron Siskind Foundation, among others. Elmaleh resides in Paw Paw, West Virginia, in a primitive cabin.

Richard Frishman's photographs explore how the built environment reveals our cultural priorities and prejudices. In 2021 Frishman was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for photography. His winning documentary project, Ghosts of Segregation, was published in 2024 by Celadon/Macmillan. The traveling exhibition of Ghosts of Segregation is currently touring the United States and Europe.

Frishman's photography is included in a wide range of collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, and the OAS Art Museum of the Americas. In addition to the Guggenheim Fellowship, His work has garnered numerous awards, including the 2019 Review Santa Fe Curator's Choice Award (juror: Makeda Best), the 2019 PhotoNOLA Portfolio Award, two Sony World Photography Awards (2018), a Communication Arts Photography Award (2018), and a Photo District News Photo Annual Award (2018). In 1983, he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in feature photography.

When he puts down his camera, Frishman lectures around the United States about the intersection of the designed environment, history, and social issues.

Victoria Sambunaris photographs the continuing transformation of the American landscape with specific attention given to expanding political, technological, and industrial interventions. Her work has been widely exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the United States and abroad. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the 2021 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award. Radius Books published her monographs Taxonomy of a Landscape and recently released Transformation of a Landscape. She is represented by Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York.