This Education Resource Guide accompanies the My Park Moment exhibition on view at the Presidio. You might use this guide as an introduction to the exhibition, as a follow-up to your visit, or as a virtual way to experience the work of these artists.
PhotoWings Education Partnership
PhotoWings + Photoville
Education Partnership
The PHOTOVILLE Festival, New York City’s FREE premier photo destination, returned for a ninth year, but in a different way. In 2020, the event went virtual and featured public exhibitions, online storytelling events, artist talks, workshops, demonstrations, educational programs, and community programming. This pivot allowed the Photoville Festival to continue providing an accessible venue for photographers and audiences from every walk of life to engage with each other, and experience thought-provoking photography from across the globe – with free admission for all! We were honored to partner again with Photoville for our 4th Festival year!
The PhotoWings x Photoville education partnership provides year-round education workshops, educators labs, educator grants, lesson plans, FENCE Education Guides, artist talks, and field trips geared towards engaging students and educators with visual storytelling.
Produced by Photoville Education in partnership with PhotoWings and Abrons Art Center
Photoville Educator Labs are professional development workshops for educators to be inspired, connect and collaborate on ways to bring visual storytelling into the classroom. The program is free and open to educators of all subjects and of all ages, but the content will be focused on middle school and high school art teachers working in the DOE and in community programs.
Educators Labs:
Educators who want to bring photography and visual storytelling into the classroom can join free one-day professional development workshops. They can practice how to use photography in the classroom, learn strategies to use photography to enhance literacy, analysis and critical thinking skills and work directly with artists to develop visual storytelling-based lesson plans. Teachers can brainstorm and collaborate with teach across New York City and across disciplines. Download lesson plans produced by collaborating educators and artists.
Creating with Community Educator Notebook
Throughout the Spring 2021 Educator Labs, Photoville had lively, exciting, challenging, inspiring, and fun conversations amongst educators and artists about creating collaborative and community-based art with students.
Together, we asked questions, swapped ideas, and workshopped new strategies. We are thrilled to share the Creating with Community Educator Notebook to spark community collaboration ideas for you and your students.
Many thanks to the Photoville Student Notetakers: Crystal Alexandra, Fatmata Bah, Cydney Blitzer, Alyssa Dickson, Carly Harrison, Angelica Negron, and Daniel- José S. Cyan, and Discussion Facilitators Roy Baizan, Jessica Bal, Jasmin Chang, Brenna McLaughlin, Lorie Novak, and Josie Wells.
Inside, you'll find:
- Many topics exploring ways for educators to create collaborative and community-based art with students.
- Unique documentation of the Spring 2021 Educator Lab from our team of college student note-takers.
- Ideas for how to engage more authentically and empathetically in the classroom.
Helpful resources to provide further context for each discussion.
Download the Creating with Community Educational Resource PDF here.
Explore the Connecting Through Time Intergenerational & Family Storytelling Toolkit
At the onset of COVID-19, with a desire to create resources to help young people and families make the most of the time we were all spending inside our homes, Photoville invited a working group of artist-educators to collaborate and build resources for intergenerational storytelling. Kamal Badhey, Wendy Barrales, and Natalia Guerrero have each explored intergenerational storytelling with their students and in their own work. Bringing together their unique experiences as individuals, artists and educators, we explored why this work is valuable, ways to do this work, and the connecting & liberating possibilities of intergenerational storytelling.
This resource addresses three core processes in intergenerational storytelling: connecting, making, and sharing. Each section begins with guiding questions and offers activities and lessons. Also included are recorded artists talks and an inspiration bank of artists who explore archives and ancestry in a myriad of reflective, innovative ways.
This toolkit is made to be mixed and matched. Several lessons can be combined to build a longer project, or used as singular activities. The lessons are designed for use with groups of students, but can also be used with individuals of all ages in the context of your home and community. This toolkit is presented in partnership with PhotoWings, who are deeply passionate about intergenerational learning through photography.
Download the Connecting Through Time Intergenerational & Family Storytelling Toolkit here.
Explore the We, Women Educational Resource Guide
The We, Women photo-based exhibition, created in collaboration with communities across the U.S., tells stories about crucial issues on the minds of many Americans: immigration, education, climate change, race, motherhood and family, gun control, healthcare, religion, criminal justice reform, gentrification, sexual assault, and more. The project expands inclusiveness in the visual media landscape as it envisions solutions. The exhibition is now LIVE with its first stop in New York City! As educational partner for the exhibition, PhotoWings invites you to download the Education Resource Guide.
Explore the My Park Moment Educator Handbook
The My Park Moment Photo Show celebrates our local and national parks, and the great memories and diverse experiences we all have in them. It turns the microphone over to people from communities across the Bay Area and beyond to share what makes parks special to them.
The introductory questions invite you to explore and discuss the exhibition. Individual artist pages for the 4 Visual Story Award winners include project descriptions, artist bios, guiding questions, and more. We hope that these materials enhance your experience of the exhibition and prompt meaningful discussions.
This large-scale, outdoor exhibition is made up of 400 photos shared by a large and diverse group of people, including everyday park goers, teenagers, and professional photographers. Hand-picked by a distinguished group of creators and community leaders from thousands of submissions, these beautiful, inspiring images capture the beauty of the great outdoors and the joy that time in nature can bring. The show invites one and all to explore, celebrate, and reflect on the role parks play in our lives.
Photoville Festival Education Day:
The annual Photoville Festival Education Day gives local middle and high school students an inside look into the exhibitions, artists and curators that make up the Photoville Festival, New York’s premier pop-up photo destination. The program includes artist-led exhibition tours, youth photographer panels, educator resources, including Photoville Fence Education Guides and professional development.
In 2020, the virtual Photoville Festival encompassed three weeks of programming where 15 Artists / Curators shared their work with 564 students in MEET THE ARTISTS sessions and YOUTH PANELS presented 4 programs to over 300 students.
Educator Grants
Building on 3 years of collaboration with educators to develop lesson plans inspired by photography projects, the Photoville x PhotoWings Educator Grants are an opportunity for educators in the UPI community to receive resources and support to implement a photo-based lesson from the UPI Teacher Resource library in their classroom and produce a culminating exhibition of student work.
We are excited and proud to share with you the inaugural Educator Grantees: Leigh Klonksy & Mariam Aryai Rivera.
They will both receive $1000 cash grant and a $2000 production budget. Get to know these phenomenal educators below....
Leigh Klonksy
East Side Community High School (Lower East Side)
Inspired by the UPI lesson plan Living City (NYC Municipal Archives), Leigh’s 11th grade Digital Photography class will create a new archive of the Lower East Side exploring topics such as storefronts/commerce, fashion, climate change, outsider/insider and more. They will examine historical photos and create new artwork and writing about their community, resulting in a series of accordion books and a public exhibition outside their school.
Mariam Aryai Rivera
Art Start/Nelson Avenue Residence (The Bronx)
Inspired by the UPI lesson plans Who We Are and Who They Say We Are (Griselda San Martin), Developing Self (Idris Solomon) and Hiding in Plain Sight (Brooke DiDonato), Mariam’s middle school program, co-located in a family shelter, will practice self + community love and identity, while learning the importance of consent and empowered creative decision making.
Browse our Teacher Resource library for over 20 free lesson plans and resource guides for incorporating photography and storytelling into the classroom. These lesson plans were developed in collaboration with over 100 educators through our Teacher Professional Development Workshop. We welcome you to use these in your classroom!
Photoville FENCE Education Guides
8th Edition Educator Guide
7th Edition Educator Guide
Explore all Lesson Plans:
What is Home?
Based on the exhibition Finding Home, presented at Photoville 2017 by Pulitzer Center & Time. Students will explore ideas of “home” in connection to refugees worldwide and homelessness locally by looking closely at the images and text from Finding Home.
Based on the exhibition Contact High: Hip-Hop’s Iconic Photographs and Visual Culture, presented at Photoville 2017 by Contact High. Students will use historic and archival images to engage in topics of identity, relationships and friendships. They will analyze the role of photography in creating a historical perspective of individuals and events and discuss how technology has changed this dynamic. They will translate visual information in text and vice versa.
Based on the exhibition ReSisters: Behind the Scenes of the Women’s March, presented at Photoville 2017 by Kisha Bari & the Women’s March. Students will use the Women’s March as a springboard to explore issues surrounding social justice and the impact social media had in organizing this worldwide event. Through research, students will plan and document their own social justice action plan using social media as primary organizer.
Based on the exhibition Newest Americans, presented at Photoville 2017 by United Photo Industries, Talking Eyes Media, VII Photo, and Rutgers University-Newark. Every year, there is a new group of students who come into our school. Students will learn and practice journalistic techniques which will help them get to know each other and explore their identities in the context of the broader school community.
Based on the exhibition Living in the City, presented at Photoville 2017 by the Department of Records and Information Services. Given archival photos and cameras, students will analyze patterns of change in their neighborhoods, between 1988 to 2018, by documenting current areas and predicting what will change in the next 30 years.
Based on the project Block Party, exhibited at United Photo Industries from September 3 – 26, 2015. Students will collaborate on creating a mosaic of faces that represent their “school block” representing how individuality can come together as community, and breaking down stereotypes, assumptions and ignorances regarding each other.
Based on the project Jua Kali, exhibited at United Photo Industries from February 4 – March 26, 2016. Students use self-portraiture as a way to explore and represent identities. Students are encouraged to use their imagination to design and create worlds outside of their built environment.
Based on the project Kin, featured on The FENCE 2017 outdoor public art exhibition. Students will reflect on important relationships in their lives through photography and writing.
Based on the project Living in Sanctuary, a sister project of Abuelas presented as an Emergi-cube at Photoville 2017. Based on the project Living in Sanctuary, students will reflect on the themes of home, identity, family, and safety and tell their own narrative through images, text and audio.
Based on the project Documenting Detroit, presented at Photoville 2017 by Documenting Detroit with support from Photowings. Students will show Our America, each defining 1 question that frames the stories they show and tell, towards a public outcome (an exhibition, a printed book or magazine, or a projection).
Based on the project cit.i.zen.ship, exhibited at Photoville from September 13 – 23, 2018 in Brooklyn Bridge Park. Students will identify and research a current event of personal interest in order to ultimately design an image and text presentation on the topic.
Based on the project North Shore, exhibited at Photoville from September 13 – 23, 2018 in Brooklyn Bridge Park. Students use photos to examine layers of communities and explore representations of identities. Students will be asked to create their stories about their communities with visuals.
Based on the project Altar: Prayer, Ritual, Offerings, exhibited at Photoville from September 13 – 23, 2018 in Brooklyn Bridge Park. Through exploring our own legacies and ancestries, we delve into understanding how and why people around the world have documented and celebrated their stories and rituals.
Based on the project The Soul(s) Of, exhibited at Photoville from September 13 – 23, 2018 in Brooklyn Bridge Park. Students will reflect on their public/private identities, and create a collage-based self-portrait.
Based on the project Life After Life in Prison: The Bedroom Project, exhibited at Photoville from September 13 – 23, 2018 in Brooklyn Bridge Park. Students will reflect on a difficult time in their lives when they had to overcome adversity, using photography and text to represent their experience.
Based on the project Host, featured on the 7th Edition of The Photoville Fence, exhibited in public parks and downtowns across 8 cities in North America. Students will interact within virtual and physical spaces/places using projected images of those spaces/places with which students feel an emotional connection.
Based on the project Blackbirds, featured on the 7th Edition of The Photoville Fence, exhibited in public parks and downtowns across 8 cities in North America. Students will slow down their image-making process and use technology that requires deliberate staging of photographs. Students will explore what it means to be the authors and subjects of artistic and historical study. This project aims to activate and inspire personal agency and self-expression.
Based on the project As Usual, featured on the 7th Edition of The Photoville Fence, exhibited in public parks and downtowns across 8 cities in North America.Use photography to encourage students to see new perspectives on objects, people, and places they encounter every day.
Inspired by the project The Wall, featured on the 7th Edition of The Photoville Fence, exhibited in public parks and downtowns across 8 cities in North America. Students will identify and interrupt dominant narratives in the media by creating visual projects that tell a counter-narrative about themselves and/or their community.
Inspired by the exhibition No Wahala, It’s All Good: A Spiritual Cypher Within the Hip-Hop Diaspora presented at Photoville from September 12 – 22, 2019.Students will be asked to look at the music traditions in their own lives and document them using various photography equipment and approaches. Students will use the subject of music as a way of beginning a conversation with a family member, whom they will interview and create a photo essay about.
Inspired by the exhibition The Players’ Tribune presented at Photoville from September 12 – 22, 2019.Working in pairs, students will create a narrative that reveals two sides of their partner through portraiture and story writing.
Inspired by the exhibition #Thisis18, presented by The New York Times at Photoville from September 12 – 22, 2019. Students will use photos to learn about ourselves and each other, both inside and outside of the classroom. They will focus on what narratives about teenagers exist already, and the narratives they want to present of themselves.
Inspired by the project There is only one Paul R. Williams presented by Janna Ireland at The Annenberg Space for Photography presents Photoville LA from April 25 – May 4, 2019. Students will create a photo story that personifies a space that they choose or claim as their own using abstraction and other compositional techniques.
Inspired by the photography of Bethany Mollenkof, part of the Women Photograph exhibition at The Annenberg Space for Photography presents Photoville LA from April 25 – May 4, 2019. Students will explore the role that empathy and representation plays in examining our perceptions of a set of photos.
Inspired by the project Typecast at Photoville from September 12-22, 2019 In this lesson students will create a self portrait diptych inspired by the project Typecast. Students will begin by reflecting on their identity and stereotypes they inherited from the world around them. After reflecting on their personal and public identities, students will examine the work of Typecast drawing conclusion to the artists’ overall concept. Lastly, students will use their analyses of Typecast as inspiration for their own diptych featuring their typecast self versus their ideal self. This lesson was written with both digital and traditional classes in mind with multiple options to fit the needs of both.
Inspired by the project Waterkeeper Warriors, presented by Waterkeeper Alliance in partnership with Culture Trip at Photoville from September 12-22, 2019. Students will define and make personal connections to the environment around them through photography. They will identify the issues important to them, and through research and storytelling, they will present solutions-driven journalism about their topic.
Inspired by the project Clubhouse Turn presented by United Photo Industries at The Annenberg Space for Photography presents Photoville LA from April 25 – May 4, 2019. Students will consider how to tell the larger story of a community through focused documentation over time of a small section of their shared space.
Photoville EDU Artist Talks
Teaching Artists Microgrants allow art educators to share their stories, knowledge, skills and ongoing practice. Due to COVID-19, many teaching artists have lost pay, work and access to students, while teachers are in need of online content for their students. The artist talks enhanced the remote learning experience of students, connected artists and teachers and complemented the Photoville Lesson Plans which will continue to be available online.
Artist Talk with Adama Delphine Fawundu
This artist talk accompanies the Photoville lesson plan Music as Artifact.
Students will be asked to look at the music traditions in their own lives and document them using various photography equipment and approaches. Students will use the subject of music as a way of beginning a conversation with a family member, whom they will interview and create a photo essay about. Inspired by the exhibition No Wahala, It’s All Good: A Spiritual Cypher Within the Hip-Hop Diaspora presented at Photoville from September 12–22, 2019.
Artist Talk with Bethany Mollenkof
This artist talk accompanies the Photoville lesson plan Empathy and Photography.
Students will explore the role that empathy and representation plays in examining our perceptions of a set of photos. Inspired by the photography of Bethany Mollenkof, part of the Women Photograph exhibition at The Annenberg Space for Photography presents Photoville LA from April 25–May 4, 2019.
Artist Talk with Brooke DiDonato
This artist talk accompanies the Photoville lesson plan Hiding in Plain Sight.
Use photography to encourage students to see new perspectives on objects, people, and places they encounter every day. Based on the project As Usual, featured on the 7th Edition of The Photoville Fence, exhibited in public parks and downtowns across 8 cities in North America.
Artist Talk with Cinthya Santos-Briones
This artist talk accompanies the Photoville lesson plan Sanctuary.
Students will reflect on the themes of home, identity, family, and safety and tell their own narrative through images, text and audio. Based on the project Living in Sanctuary, a sister project of Abuelas presented as an Emergi-cube at Photoville 2017.
Artist Talk with Emily Schiffer
This artist talk accompanies the Photoville lesson plan From the Inside Out.
Students will reflect on important relationships in their lives through photography and writing. Based on the project Kin, featured on The FENCE 2017 outdoor public art exhibition.
Artist Talk with Griselda San Martin & Haruka Sakaguchi
This artist talk accompanies the Photoville lesson plan Typecast.
In this lesson students will create a self portrait diptych inspired by the project Typecast. Students will begin by reflecting on their identity and stereotypes they inherited from the world around them. After reflecting on their personal and public identities, students will examine the work of Typecast drawing conclusion to the artists’ overall concept. Lastly, students will use their analyses of Typecast as inspiration for their own diptych featuring their typecast self versus their ideal self. Inspired by the project Typecast at Photoville from September 12–22, 2019.
Artist Talk with Idris Solomon
This artist talk accompanies the Photoville lesson plan Developing Self.
Students will slow down their image-making process and use technology that requires deliberate staging of photographs. Students will explore what it means to be the authors and subjects of artistic and historical study. This project aims to activate and inspire personal agency and self-expression. Based on the project Blackbirds, featured on the 7th Edition of The Photoville Fence, exhibited in public parks and downtowns across 8 cities in North America.
Artist Talk with Janna Ireland
This artist talk accompanies the Photoville lesson plan Portrait of a Space.
Students will create a photo story that personifies a space that they choose or claim as their own using abstraction and other compositional techniques. Inspired by the project There is only one Paul R. Williams presented by Janna Ireland at The Annenberg Space for Photography presents Photoville LA from April 25–May 4, 2019.
Artist Talk with Lluvia Higuera
This artist talk accompanies the Photoville lesson plan Forming Your Identity.
Through collaborative portraiture, students will consider people who have influenced and inspired them reflecting on how their identities have been shaped, and how they want to pay it forward. Inspired by the project Shaping a Dialogue for Change presented at The Annenberg Space for Photography presents Photoville LA from April 25–May 4, 2019.
Artist Talk with Makeba Rainey
This artist talk accompanies the Photoville lesson plan Selfie#Selfie#Collage#Me. Students will reflect on their public/private identities, and create a collage-based self-portrait. Based on the project The Soul(s) Of, exhibited at Photoville from September 13–23, 2018 in Brooklyn Bridge Park.
Artist Talk with Sara Bennett
This artist talk accompanies the Photoville lesson plan Understanding Self. Students will reflect on a difficult time in their lives when they had to overcome adversity, using photography and text to represent their experience. Based on the project Life After Life in Prison: The Bedroom Project, exhibited at Photoville from September 13–23, 2018 in Brooklyn Bridge Park.