The PhotoWork Foundation is proud to announce the Mentors for the 2026 Senior Fellowship. These distinguished artists and educators will work closely with their Fellows over the next six months, offering guidance through both the conceptual and technical stages of developing a project into book form.
Mentors will meet monthly with their Fellows to explore each phase of the photobook making process, including concept development, editing, design, production, and publication. In addition to this one-on-one mentorship, their Fellows will deepen their understanding of the photobook through educational sessions led by invited industry professionals, supporting them as they move toward publishing their first monograph.
Raymond Meeks
Raymond Meeks lives and works in the Hudson Valley (New York). His work is represented in numerous private and public collections. He is the sixth laureate of Immersion, a French-American photography commission sponsored by Fondation d’entreprise Hermès. Exhibitions from this commission are scheduled for New York (ICP September, 2023) and Paris (Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson September, 2024). The Inhabitants, a book made in collaboration with writer George Weld, was published in August 2023 by MACK.
Raymond will mentor Senior Fellow Maureen Beitler.
Ahndraya Parlato
Ahndraya Parlato has a BA from Bard College and an MFA from California College of the Arts. She has published four books: TIME TO KILL, (Mack Books, 2026), Who Is Changed and Who Is Dead, (Mack Books, 2021), A Spectacle and Nothing Strange, (Kehrer Verlag, 2016), and East of the Sun, West of the Moon, (a collaboration with Gregory Halpern, Études Books, 2014).
Additionally, Ahndraya has contributed texts to: Devotions for Francesca Woodman (Saint Lucy Books, 2026), Double Feature (St. Lucy Books, 2025), Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Shoot (Aperture, 2021), and The Photographer’s Playbook (Aperture, 2014).
She has exhibited work at: Spazio Labo, in Bologna, Italy, Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh, PA, The Aperture Foundation, New York, NY, and The Swiss Institute, Milan, Italy. Ahndraya has been awarded residencies at The Ellis Beauregard Foundation, Light Work and The Visual Studies Workshop, and grants from Light Work, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is a 2024 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow.
Ahndraya has taught in the Bard College and Cornell Image Text MFA programs and is currently an Assistant Professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Ahndraya will mentor Senior Fellow Pete Pin.
Mark Steinmetz
Mark Steinmetz is a photographer who resides in Athens, Georgia (USA). He has published several books with the Nazraeli Press (Paso Robles, CA): South Central, South East, Greater Atlanta, Summertime, Italia, The Ancient Tigers of my Neighborhood, Paris in my time, The Players, Summer Camp, ATL, France, 1987 and a three-volume set, Angel City West. Stanley/Barker (London) has published 15 Miles to K-ville, Past K-ville, Carnival and Rivers & Towns. Kominek Books (Berlin) released Berlin Pictures in 2021 and Taken from Light in 2025. Nazraeli released Chicago in February, 2025 and will release Low Fi Cats in April, 2026.
Steinmetz’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and others. He has taught photography at Harvard University, Yale University, Sarah Lawrence College, Emory University, and The University of Hartford MFA Program. Steinmetz is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe.
Steinmetz had one-person shows at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art (New Orleans) in 2015, and at the Yancey Richardson Gallery (New York) and Lothringer13 Halle (Munich) in 2017. His work on the Atlanta airport, Terminus, was shown at the High Museum of Art (Atlanta) in the spring of 2018, and he had large one-person shows at Fotohof in Salzburg, Austria in 2019, Murkudis Gallery, Berlin in 2022, and the Palac Schoena Muzeum in Sosnowiec, Poland in 2024.
Mark Steinmetz is co-director of The Humid, a photographic workshop and gathering space, with his wife, Irina Rozovksy.
Mark will mentor Senior Fellow Vikesh Kapoor.