The upcoming 2026 DPI BFA Exhibition will showcase the impressive talents of the graduating seniors from the Department of Photography & Imaging at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Curated with care by Kalia Brooks, this exhibition celebrates the culmination of their creative journeys and features an extraordinary collection of work from this talented class.
Join us in celebrating this vibrant exhibition at two locations: the Gulf + Western Gallery, located in the rear lobby on the first floor, and the spacious 8th-floor Gallery at 721 Broadway, near Waverly Place. Both venues invite you to immerse yourself in the diverse artistic expressions on display until May 17, 2025.
With 48 innovative thesis projects, the exhibition showcases a range of media, including powerful photographs, artfully crafted books, captivating installations, and interactive experiences that engage and provoke thought. These graduates are not just redefining photography; they are fearlessly exploring the fusion of various media to create works that resonate deeply.
Addressing a rich tapestry of themes such as identity, the human experience, place and time, spirituality, technology’s influence, memories, and globalization, their projects are a testament to their growth as artists during their time at NYU. This exhibition beautifully encapsulates the global perspectives and critical thinking skills that NYU fosters in its students. Each piece offers a personal glimpse into their artistic evolution and the passion that drives their work. We can't wait to celebrate their achievements together!
Participating Artists Include:
Aidan Kang
Two Edges isn’t about comparing one coast to another; it’s about how vision drifts, how memory shapes observation, and how the horizon you grew up with never fully leaves.
Aiden Wong Achuck
Benny is an examination of how coastal communities respond to climate trauma and cultural shifts, or how people respond to crisis.
Alexander Thomas-Tikhonenko
From the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain from 1989-91, to my father’s journeys across Eurasia and the United States and my 2024 project of scanning his 2,000 travel negatives, this story traces how geopolitical change, migration, exploration, and the search for freedom ultimately shaped my existence.
Amy Gao Tan
Form in Flux is a computational art project that reimagines static abstract masterpieces as living systems, deconstructing the "visual DNA" into generative algorithms that produce infinite, dynamic variations free from their original narrative constraints.
Blau
Layer 1, “ The Apple of Blau’s Eye,” is a bold sentiment and seemingly playful nihilistic departure from the urban perspective.
Brewer Roberts
This work is dedicated to those who created community-led groups 36 years ago in Klouekanme, to those who continue to aid individuals, families, and communities to this day, and to those seeking ways to help new ones begin.
Camille Lizcano
Keeping Your Inner Child Alive is a playful photography project that celebrates creativity, imagination, and the joy of childhood.
Colleen Casserly
The ability of humans to form family from strangers is one of the most normalized yet fundamental phenomena of coming into yourself and your adult life.
Eli Jones
“Watered Petals” reveals how identity blooms, falters, and reforms, echoing the natural rhythms of growth and impermanence.
Elinor Kry
Bloodletting traces a return to Vinh Long, Vietnam, where Kry witnesses her mother, who fled the country as a child refugee decades earlier, struggle to reintegrate into a life and family marked by war, revealing the distance between who she was, has become, and the fragile roots that bind them.
Ella Caridi
As an arts student, I combine photography, design, and curation in a zine project that documents visual artists across New York City and beyond through portraiture, interviews, and storytelling that highlights both their creative processes and environments.
Elleah Gipson
By Blood examines how twins of different ages and cultures negotiate identity, closeness, and individuality as they grow and their lives start to differ.
Em Higgins
Inspired by an ex-boyfriend who confessed his secrets in the shower, Guilty Conscience reimagines the shower as a modern confessional where photographed acts of secret-telling cleanse participants of shame.
Gabrielle Thandiwe Bates
“Because They Were, I Am" celebrates familial Black archives by revealing the tension between what is preserved, who is being recorded, and what stories falter into the quiet. Each photograph becomes a site where time and presence are pieced together.
Hunter Mathews
“The Kingdom We Made” documents childhood in Huntingburg, Indiana, where fields become kingdoms and play becomes power, treating imagination as resistance and portraying youth as a fleeting realm of fragile sovereignty in which freedom, belonging, and the body matter most.
Hyun Jun Kim
“The Skin of the City” explores urban architecture as a living portrait of society, revealing how the surfaces of New York reflect the collective identity and rhythm of its people.
Isaac James
Where something until you cannot, it will become sharper.
Isolde Jandaya Aburabi
Despite his complicated and difficult upbringing, my dad has been a present and wonderful father; Wish You Were Here is not only an overdue documentation of him, but an expression of my gratitude to him for instilling in me such a deep belief in love, in good parenting, and in myself.
Jerry Ruiqi Li / 李睿祺
How do you hold on to a homeland that no longer remembers you?
Jin Hyun
Through the instinctive process of photographing and printing in analogue mediums, manipulating and sequencing the images that capture my attention, I explore my own agony, conflict, and healing while hoping that others may find reflection and companionship within my work.
Jingwen (Jill) Liu
སྒྲོལ་མ་ (卓玛 Dolma) traces the resilience of a newly immigrated Buddhist family through archival images and intimate portraits, centering on their youngest daughter—born with a developmental disorder and epilepsy—to reveal how hope, faith, and love anchor identity across displacement.
Julie Lee
Echoes in Three Perspectives traces how the same place, day, and time can hold three entirely different stories — mine, others’, and the city’s own.
Karin Gao
The Court Performance is where fashion refuses its limits and the body breaks the rules.
Kayla Gilly
Mind Palace is a window into my mental landscape, exploring tropes of queerness, womanhood, religion, and contemporary digital culture.
Kya Berry
My work encourages Black individuals to allow ourselves not only to hope but to dream, actively and expansively, to conceive a world in which we can occupy space whenever and wherever we choose.
Lauren Whyte
Through these physical landscapes and self-portraits, I hope to create an intimate archive of a homeland on the edge of disappearance.
Mya Barrie
Capturing America’s quiet decay and erasure of rural space, Parts Unknown: Remnants of Forgotten America explores poetry in desolation and beauty in decline.
Nate Schoen
Using Extension, I explore hair as a profound form of self-expression and identity, shaped by personal experience and enriched through portraits that illuminate how its textures, styles, and transformations act not merely as reflections but as meaningful extensions of the self, carrying mood, heritage, memory, and individuality beyond the purely aesthetic.
Nicholas Wheat
Dancing with Bulls documents jaripeo, a vibrant tradition in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, where rodeo, religious ritual, and norteña music and dance converge.
Nikolai Jingyuan Liu
“Rehearsals for the End of History” traces the contested legacy of Erzsébet Liu – born in 1989 in the former Austro-Hungarian Concession of Changsha, educated in Imperial Etiquette, censored for her subversive scholarship, and later disappearing into post-socialist Europe – to examine how imperial residues, Maoist devotion, and the bureaucratic afterlives of collapsed regimes persist within contemporary cultural and political life.
Paras Musallam
Collective Fiction presents a series of staged pictures of seemingly carefree subjects in sumptuous settings in order to convey a reality that cannot possibly be true, no matter how much subjects strive to portray it nor how much the audience wants to believe it.
Raj Hariharan
Groundwater is a photographic project exploring how communities in South India adapt their agricultural, architectural, and everyday practices to the shifting rhythms and challenges of the monsoon season.
Sienna Geddes
Look Up illustrates my memories of growing up in Montana, exploring the impact of time and distance it renders the boundaries of those memories obsolete.
Sophia Herzog
I am experiencing my own renaissance.
Tessa Belle Dillman
“1-100” is a project where I photographed individuals, from a one year old infant, to someone at the outer edge of our human lifespan, at 100 years old.
Tierney Smith
"The Field Has Eyes" is a self-portraiture series by Tierney Smith which explores an obsession with "the gaze" as it pertains to the female figure and the onset of adulthood.
Vallery Orr
Through infrared photography, I invite viewers to imagine what else might exist just beyond perception and to question how much of reality we’re actually seeing.
Willow Lula
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Ye Ma
Cosplay Girls traces the private space where virtual characters intersect with real selves, exploring the complexity of identity within cosplay culture.
Yun Cho
"Weaving Bonds From Fracture" reveals how fracture itself can become the quiet space where new connections take hold and slowly begin to grow.
Yunbo Ma
Contemporary Manifestations of Dharma is a photography project that traces how religious symbols—from Tibetan Buddhism to other global faiths—become lived, commercialized, and reshaped within the spaces of everyday life.”
Zorrie Petrus
Through the inspiration of my mother, “Golden” displays black women of various shades of melanin, body types, and hair styles to show the everlasting versatility.