The PhotoWork Foundation is thrilled to announce the 2026 PhotoWork Senior Fellows. Beginning in May, three exceptional artists will embark on six-month mentorships to develop their first photobook projects. Each Fellow receives a $10,000 grant, a dedicated mentor, and guidance from leading voices in the photobook publishing world.
With guidance from their mentors and input from invited publishing professionals, Fellows will explore every stage of the photobook process, from concept development to editing and sequencing, design, and production. At the conclusion of the fellowship, each Fellow will have produced a preliminary maquette and gained the knowledge and foundation to pursue their first photobook.
We are deeply grateful to our jurors: Dr. Sarah Kennel, Aaron Siskind Curator of Photography and Director, Raysor Center for Works on Paper at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; Sage Sohier, Photographer; and Marley Trigg Stewart, Artist & Curator. Their thoughtful deliberation was instrumental in selecting this year’s cohort of Senior Fellows.
Maureen Beitler
Maureen Beitler is a documentary and fine art photographer based in the Hudson Valley. Her work centers on environmental portraiture and long-term projects addressing women’s empowerment and resilience, family dynamics, and the lives of those in marginalized or difficult circumstances.
Raised in a working-class family in Baltimore, she draws on personal narrative to examine ideas of belonging and the formation of home and family. A former critical care nurse, she brings a sensitivity to both hardship and beauty in everyday life.
Maureen plans to refine work from her project To the Bone during the Senior Fellowship, working with her Mentor to explore layout, sequence, pairings, text, and the interplay of color and black and white within her photobook maquette.
Maureen is the recipient of the 2026 Teresa Goodman Grant.
Vikesh Kapoor
Vikesh Kapoor is an interdisciplinary artist from rural Pennsylvania and based in Los Angeles. Through photography, moving image, installation, music, and poetry, he explores the mythos of the American Dream. His work is currently included in The Outwin: American Portraiture Today at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian.
Vikesh plans to use the PhotoWork Senior Fellowship to refine the maquette for his photobook Hello, my soft corner!, a personal narrative tracing his parents’ migration from India to rural Pennsylvania, his mother’s death, and his father’s life continuing on without her. The book asks what the pursuit of the American Dream looks like at the end of a life.
Pete Pin
Pete Pin was born in 1982 in the Khao-I-Dang refugee camp on the Cambodia–Thailand border. Raised in Stockton, California, after his family’s resettlement as refugees, his work centers on memory, migration, and intergenerational trauma. A high school dropout, he later graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and earned an MFA in Photography from the University of Hartford.
Pete’s work, which draws on personal and collective histories of the Cambodian diaspora, has been supported by institutions including the Magnum Foundation and Open Society Foundations and exhibited widely. Rooted in both family narrative and broader cultural inquiry, his practice treats photography as a vehicle for transmitting and transforming inherited memory, engaging ideas of post-memory, trauma, and the possibility of repair across generations. Pete lives in the Hudson with his wife, their two children, their dog Otis and a cat named Grace.
During the fellowship, Pete will further develop his ongoing project That Was Then This Is Now, exploring the fragmented geography of memory and inheritance connected to his own family story, refining a book maquette that weaves together photographs made in Cambodia and the United States. He will use the fellowship period to re-edit and experiment with the material, deepening the project’s structure and visual language through sustained editorial dialogue.