Introducing the 2026 PhotoWork Junior Fellows. From January through June, six emerging photographers will develop a body of work under the guidance of a dedicated mentor, refining their artistic voices and clarifying their vision.
The PhotoWork Junior Fellowship celebrates individual artists and their craft, providing a space for learning and experimentation outside traditional academic settings. Through a holistic support network, Fellows receive tailored guidance that meets them at their current stage while encouraging critical growth and strengthening the foundation for their future careers. The 2026 Junior Fellows are:
Yuhan Cheng
Brayan Enriquez
Claire Kosky
Jacobb Nichol
Avery Norman
Dahveed Wilkins
Additionally, ten outstanding shortlisted applicants will receive a portfolio review with our Executive Director, Sasha Wolf.
Over this six-month fellowship, each Fellow will receive $1,000 in financial support from the PhotoWork Foundation, $2,000 in in-kind support from picturehouse + thesmalldarkroom, including individualized post-production guidance, and will participate in professional practice and artistic development sessions led by industry experts.
We thank all applicants and are deeply grateful to our jurors, whose careful deliberation shaped this year’s cohort. This year’s jurors included; Doug DuBois, Photographer & Associate Professor at Syracuse University; Gregory Harris, Donald and Marilyn Keough Family Curator of Photography, High Museum of Art; Sara Ickow, Associate Director of Exhibitions, ICP & Managing Director of Women Photograph; Pauline Vermare, Phillip and Edith Leonian Curator of Photography, Brooklyn Museum; Leslie M. Wilson, Academic Curator and Director of Research Programs, Art Institute Chicago
The PhotoWork Foundation is proud to offer the PhotoWork Junior Fellowship for its third consecutive year, providing educational and developmental opportunities for emerging photographers while advancing our mission to deepen collective understanding of contemporary society through the photographic arts.
Yuhan Cheng
Yuhan is a photographer, filmmaker, and interdisciplinary artist working from lived experience—friends, family, chosen family, and the shifting space between homes. They shoot on film and handle all processing and printing in a small home darkroom, editing slowly and precisely. Their projects revolve around the body, home, belonging, and the contradictions between inner life and outward form. They are drawn to the gap between photography’s promise of permanence and the instability of lived reality, and work through that tension using both auto-fictional and documentary approaches.
Yuhan hopes to use this fellowship to strengthen their writing, tighten editing, and bring The Feminine Sun (working title) into a clearer, more structured form. They plan to explore how this project can be presented, and what other possibilities exist for developing and showing the work. They are looking for focused guidance—and real critique—to help them shape the project so it holds together with intention.
Brayan Enriquez
Brayan Enriquez is a first-generation Mexican American artist based in Atlanta, GA. His work seeks familial reconciliation as he travels to Mexico to connect with his extended family, many of whom he had never met or had not seen since their deportation from the U.S. over a decade ago. Using photography and collage, he travels to his parents’ hometowns in Acapulco and Tampico as he reaches for resonance among his family, the landscape, and their family archive. Through this newfound closeness, he aspires to mine lived experiences spanning generations and nation-states, imaging the effects of U.S. immigration policies, and sharing a familial knowledge drafted from memory out of reach.
During the six-month fellowship, Enriquez plans to continue traveling to Mexico, this time making work in his father’s hometown in Tampico, Tamaulipas. With the guidance of a mentor, he hopes to start building the foundation of a book, as well as learning how to incorporate alternative processes into his practice.
Claire Kosky
Claire Kosky is an artist living and working between New York and Rockbridge County, Virginia, where she grew up. Drawing on her experience living in rural places, Claire creates compassionate examinations of the interactions between humans and the natural world using large format film and digital photography. Her work tends to abstract living beings and familiar places to move into a space of terrible beauty, where the truth of the human-made world appears to the gaze of an uncertain, hesitant fascination, bringing us to consider the nature of which that world is built. She received her BA in photography from Bard College.
During her fellowship, Claire intends to deepen her professional practice with the help of her mentor while making work about the practices of young people who step back from the lure of convenient lifestyles to engage with the land.
Jacobb Nichol
Jacobb Nichol is a Southern photographer based in Arkansas. His work explores identity, culture, and belonging, shaped by growing up in skateparks and street spaces where skateboarding was a way to express the self and build community outside the norm. Those experiences taught him how style, space, and group dynamics shape identity, and they continue to guide how he photographs people today.
His process is rooted in simply being with his subjects hanging out, talking, skating, or sitting quietly together. He focuses on creating a space where they can be themselves without judgment. Every image is a collaboration rooted in presence and care.
He plans to use this fellowship to continue and expand his ongoing series, dedicating focused time to shooting, experimenting with lighting, portraiture, and sequencing, and bringing more collaboration into the process. He hopes to take creative risks, strengthen the work, and push the project further in both depth and intention.
Avery Norman
Avery Norman is a Texas born photographer currently based in New York City. Her images serve as a form of self-mythology, a way of bridging the distance between memory, desire, and identity.
Through the PhotoWork Junior Fellowship Norman will continue an ongoing series exploring the aesthetics and emotional architecture of an imagined girlhood.
Dahveed Wilkins
Based between New York City and his hometown of Baltimore, Wilkins is a documentary artist and photographer with a darkroom based practice. He uses traditional darkroom techniques to make images focusing on memory, migration, masculinity, identity, and the self within African Diasporic life. His work involves time, research, and building long term relationships to make images of family, of the land, of the psychologies of the land, and of himself. Through self portraiture he aims to articulate abstract concepts related to both his understanding of self and shared realities of Black being.
During the PhotoWork Junior Fellowship he will grow upon his body of work focused on land, community, family, and identity; documenting the history, present, and future of his great-grandmother’s house and the surrounding spaces in West Baltimore. He is looking forward to the growth of self as well as his work throughout the fellowship, and how support and mentorship will fertilize him as an artist.
The PhotoWork Foundation would like to thank the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) for their generous support of the PhotoWork Junior Fellowship, as well as picturehouse + thesmalldarkroom for their donation of $2000 in in-kind services and post-production guidance to each of our Junior Fellows.