Spotlight:
Diane Dammeyer Fellowship

Started in 2015, the Diane Dammeyer Fellowship in Photographic Arts and Social Issues is a partnership between Columbia College Chicago and the Heartland Alliance, the Midwest’s leading anti-poverty organization. Its namesake, Dammeyer, was a real estate agent before she retired and studied photography at Columbia while serving on the board of the Heartland Alliance. She traveled internationally with the Alliance as a photographer, an experience that inspired her to fund the fellowship, which focuses on socially-engaging photography and the highlighting of social issues. 

Recent MFA graduates in photography or other creative fields have the opportunity to work with Columbia's Photography Department for an academic year (September to May). They are also awarded a $25,000 stipend to support their work. 

“I’m trying to make my work so that it's not just about people and about groups of people, but that it's also for those groups of people and is made more collaboratively,” said current fellow Jonathan Castillo. 

This collaboration with the Heartland Alliance allows fellows to see and share the stories of “endangered populations”—what the Heartland Alliance labels the poor, the isolated and the displaced—through their photographs during the year of the fellowship. 

Fereshteh Toosi’s multi-modal program, Significant Surfaces, was made during their time as the first recipient of the fellowship to “disrupt the images of poverty and victimization that audiences are accustomed to consuming,” they said. Focusing on a supportive housing environment in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood, they spent time listening to residents’ stories about overcoming exclusion from the fundamental institutions of healthcare, housing, education and jobs.

Fereshteh Toosi:

“My work involves embodied experiences, encounter, exchange, and sensory inquiry,” Toosi said. “My participatory projects are designed to cultivate artistic connections to place.”

While observing a dance therapy group trying to balance a ball on a parachute during her 2017-2018 fellowship, Anahid Ghorbani had a realization. 

“That resembled the ball of the world that we needed to balance,” Ghorbani said. “We hold it together; we lift it together; we balance it together.”  

Because she was not allowed to publicly post photos of the people she was working with, Ghorbani was faced with the task of erasing identities for legal reasons, but wanted her subjects to be “visible while still invisible.” She spoke about colors that emerge in her artwork, white being that of her work with the Heartland Alliance. 

“White is peace for me,” she said. “Joy and peace. Safety. Togetherness.” 

This notion of togetherness, as well as that of healing and resilience, is something she took away from the fellowship experience. 

Anahid Ghorbani:

“I grew as an artist and as an individual,” she added. “For the first time in my life, my whole world was thinking, feeling, and making my art.”

As the 2018-2019 fellow, Sasha Phyars-Burgess spent time in Austin, a neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side, initially planning to document and understand the gun violence there. 

“The more that I learned, the more my focus shifted to the lives that are being lived in Austin, and the importance of those lives,” Phyars-Burgess said. 

Phyars-Burgess cites the Heartland Alliance's guidance as the reason she was able to learn about the community in Austin and showcase it with her art. 

"The goal with the photographs I make is that people slow down and look," she said.

Jonathan Castillo:

Current Dammeyer fellow Jonathan Castillo’s desire for his work and himself to be connected to the people and places that helped him make it has become a large part of his time with the Heartland Alliance. 

“Not to say that the world can’t exist on gallery walls,” Castillo said. “But it should have some life within the community or with the people that made it.” 

Castillo spoke about the long history of photographers “popping into exotic locales,” leaving with their photographs, and not doing anything else. 

“I think you can strike a balance between letting people see into a part of the world or a group of people and making the work for the people you’re photographing,” he said. 

Ideally, he wants to make a space or way for these groups to interact, he explained. During his fellowship, he purposely visited as many Heartland Alliance programs as he could, especially shelters for children who arrive at the US border unaccompanied. Because he is not allowed to photograph the children in these shelters, his original plan was to photograph the empty spaces, but had to go through months of emails, phone calls, background checks and training before even getting access to the facilities. 

“I had my first appointment scheduled,” he said of his plans before the Coronavirus pandemic swept the world and almost everything in Chicago closed. “But it’s canceled. I’ve been working for months towards getting access and now it’s on hold.” 

However, Castillo remains hopeful that his work will resume soon, not just to create, but also to practice.

Sasha Phyars-Burgess:

“Something that I’m learning is that the art practice itself is not always about a finished product on a gallery wall,” he said. “It’s as much, or sometimes more, the conversations and wonderful interactions I’m having with people.” 

He sees getting to know and collaborating with the people in the communities he shows as one of the best parts of being a socially-engaged photographer. “Moving into a more socially-engaged way of working is prioritizing those things over art on the wall,” he said. 

The Dammeyer Fellowship encourages social change through work, but this work also acts as a catalyst for the fellows themselves. 

"I ended up in a place I hadn’t thought of by the end of the experience," said Ghorbani. "My project evolved around issues of representation. My vision shifted from 'me' to 'we.'" 

Castillo, whose time as a fellow is almost over, spoke about how he hopes those chosen for the fellowship can also impact the students at Columbia College. 

"Hopefully, it makes an impact on some students and they start thinking about ways their work can function in a more socially-engaged way," he said.

Fellow Websites:

Jonathan Castillo: https://www.jonmichaelphoto.com
Anahid Ghorbani: http://www.anahidghorbani.com/
Fereshteh Toosi: http://fereshteh.net
Sasha Phyars-Burgess: http://www.sashaphyars-burgess.com/