Spring 2026 RISD Photo Lecture Series

Spring 2026 RISD Photo TC Colley Lecture

Tina Campt
Thursday, April 16, Metcalf Auditorium

Tina Campt, a black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art, is Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor of Humanities in the Department of Art and Archaeology and Visual Arts Program at Princeton University, and Director of the Princeton Atelier at the Lewis Center for the Arts. She is lead convener of the Princeton Collaboratorium for Radical Aesthetics and the Practicing Refusal Collective, and the recipient of the 2025 Photographic Studies Award from the Royal Anthropological Institute for distinguished contributions to the study of anthropology and photography. She is the author of four books: Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (University Michigan Press, 2004), Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe (Duke University Press, 2012), Listening to Images (Duke University Press, 2017), and most recently, A Black Gaze (MIT Press, 2021). Her co-edited collection, Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography (with Marianne Hirsch, Gil Hochberg and Brian Wallis, Steidl, 2020) was named Photography Catalogue of the Year by Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation. 

Rose Marie Cromwell
Tuesday, March 31, 2026, Metcalf Auditorium

Rose Marie Cromwell is a photographer and artist exploring globalization’s impact on politics and the spiritual. Her debut book, El Libro Supremo de la Suerte, won the Light Work Photobook Prize and was named one of TIME’s 25 Best Photobooks of 2018; she later published Eclipse and A More Fluid Atmosphere. In 2024, she had her first solo museum exhibitions at ICA Miami, Pier 24, and The High Museum. Her work is held in many museum and library collections, including The Getty, Pérez Art Museum Miami, The Norton Museum, and The Met Library.

Birthe Piontek
Tuesday, April 21, 2026, Metcalf Auditorium

Birthe Piontek is a visual artist who works in photography, installation, sculpture, and drawing. Her photographic practice explores the interconnections between photographic images, objects, history, and personal and collective memory.

Piontek’s work has been exhibited in solo and group shows in Canada, the United States, Europe, and South America and is featured in many private and public collections, such as the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and the Museum of Applied Arts in Gera, Germany.

Piontek is the author of several photography books. The project The Idea of North won the Critical Mass Book Award in 2009 and was published by Photolucida in 2011. Her project Abendlied received the Edward Burtynsky Grant in 2018 and was nominated by Time Magazine as one of the best photo books in 2019. Her third book, Janus, was published in 2021, and her newest project, Zero Hour, was released in 2025. 

Piontek received her MFA from the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, Germany. She lives in Vancouver, Canada, where she is an Associate Professor of Photography at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design.