Fall 2025 RISD Photo Lecture Series

Ed Panar and Melissa Catanese

Tuesday, October 7, 2025, Metcalf Auditorium

Ed Panar has published several photobooks including: Winter Nights, Walking (2023), In the Vicinity (2018), Animals That Saw Me Volume One and Volume Two (2011 and 2016), Salad Days (2012), Same Difference (2010), and Golden Palms (2007). His photographs and books have been exhibited at venues including The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, The Cleveland Museum of Art and at Pier 24 Photography in San Francisco. Ed has received The Heinz Endowments Creative Development Award in 2022 and is a recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship.

Melissa Catanese plays with images as raw material, intuitively teasing out oblique and guttural interpretations, tapping the inexplicable, and often dormant space within the surface of a photograph where meaning extends and recedes. Intentionally ambiguous, fractured, and strange, her subject matter gestures toward alienation as the dominant feature of modern society, and is re-cast into carefully assembled sequences that sparkle with deep psychic longing, apocalyptic comedy, and provocative forms of beauty and violence.

Andrea Modica

Tuesday, October 28, 2025, Metcalf Auditorium

Andrea Modica lives in Philadelphia, where she works as a photographer and teaches at Drexel University. A graduate of the Yale School of Art, she is a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fulbright Scholar. Her books includeTreadwell (Chronicle Books), Barbara (Nazraeli), Minor League (Smithsonian Press), Human Being (Nazraeli), Fountain (Stinehour Editions), L’Amici del Cuore (Nazraeli), As We Wait (L’Artiere Editions), January 1 (L’Artiere Editions), Lentini (Kris Graves Projects) Reveal (Yoffy Press), 2020 (TIS Books) and Theatrum Equorum (TIS Books) and Catholic Girl (L’Artiere Editions).

Modica’s solo exhibitions include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts. Her photographs are part of the permanent collections of numerous institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the International Museum of Photography and Film at the George Eastman House, and the Bibliotheque Nationale.

Chanell Stone

Tuesday, November 11, 2025,  20 Washington Place Auditorium

Chanell Stone is an artist living and working in Oakland, California. Stone earned her BFA in Photography from the California College of the Arts in 2019 and her MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California San Diego in 2024. She has exhibited in institutions across the United States and internationally. Her solo exhibition Natura Negra was presented at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco from 2019 to 2020. More recently, her work has been displayed at the Carnegie Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Pier 24 Photography, Esker Foundation in Alberta, Canada, and Museo Cabanas in Guadalajara. Stone’s practice has been featured in The New York Times, NPR, FOAM and Aperture.com.