About the Curator and Featured Artist:

Joy Davis, Curator

Joy Davis is a curator, cultural worker, and director based in
Baltimore, MD. She has conducted relevant work in New
York, Los Angeles, and Baltimore for over 8 years. At the core
of her work, she believes it is foundational to set standards in
the Baltimore area for community relations and celebrate
artistic practices. It is important to her to make artists feel
they have a platform to be themselves and explore their
practices. In 2018, Joy conceived and created Waller Gallery
to support artists in Baltimore and beyond. Through Waller,
Joy built her curatorial experience and fluency in the art
community. For over 7 years at Waller Gallery, her work with
artists of color has been paramount to creating an equitable
gateway for artists to thrive and drive the art world.

In 2021, Joy joined Creative Alliance as the Visual Arts
Director overseeing two gallery spaces and their anchor
resident artist program. Working in two neighborhoods in
Baltimore City, she has a unique opportunity to have a
broader impact on the artist communities she serves.

Paul Abowd

Paul Abowd is a documentary producer based in D.C. In 2015,
he moved to Baltimore while finishing a film for Al Jazeera’s
Fault Lines series entitled “Baltimore Rising,” about the
aftermath of Freddie Gray’s death at the hands of police.
While living in the city, he began three independent film
projects that never got finished until this year. The first film
follows the police helicopter through the city with his late
friend, photographer Noah Scialom. A second film, coming in
future presentations, is a music video for a long-unreleased
song by his friend Genard Barr, which forms the soundtrack
to his life and work as a social worker in Sandtown. A third
film, coming in future presentations, follows housing rights
organizer Dominic Moulden on a ritual return to his
childhood home at Perkins Homes, on the eve of its
demolition. In 2018, Paul finished another film for Al Jazeera
called “The Gang Within,” about the criminal conspiracy by
an elite police unit in Baltimore to traffic seized drugs and
rob the city’s residents. Paul is a researcher for the union of
hospitality workers, UNITE HERE, and the parent of a 2.5-
year-old daughter.

Devin Allen

Baltimore native Devin Allen is an international, award-winning self-taught
photographer and artist who gained national attention when his
photograph of the Baltimore Uprising was published on the cover of Time
magazine in May 2015, making him only the third amateur photographer to
have his work featured in the publication. Following the untimely deaths of
George Floyd, Tony McDade, and Breonna Taylor, his photograph from a
Black Trans Lives Matter protest was published on the cover of Time
magazine in June 2020.

In 2017, he was named the first fellow of the Gordon Parks Foundation
Fellowship and was nominated for an NAACP Image Award as a debut
author for his book, A Beautiful Ghetto (Haymarket Books, September
2017). In 2023, he was awarded the 2023 Gordon Parks Foundation / Steidl
Book Prize. In 2020, he was named an ambassador for Leica Camera AG—
an international, premium manufacturer of cameras and sports optics.

His photographs have been published in New York Magazine, The New York
Times, The Washington Post, and Aperture; and are also in the permanent
collections of the National Museum of African American History & Culture
in Washington, D.C., the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, the Studio Museum in
Harlem, and The Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art.

He is the founder of Through Their Eyes, a youth photography educational
program, and recipient of an award from The Maryland Commission on
African American History and Culture for dynamic leadership in the Arts
and Activism. His latest book, No Justice, No Peace: From the Civil Rights
Movement to Black Lives Matter, was released in 2022 under the Legacy
Lit imprint of Hachette Book Group. Most recently, he captured the main
imagery for the sixth and final season of the hit SHOWTIME series, The Chi.

Joseph (J.M.) Giordano

Joseph (J.M.) Giordano is an award-winning photojournalist
based in Baltimore and co-host of the photojournalism
podcast, 10 Frames Per Second with Molly Roberts. His book,
We Used to Live At Night (Culture Crush Editions) chronicles
25 years of the city at night. His work has been featured on
NPR, ProPublica, Al-Jazeera, GQ, Architectural Digest, Taste,
The Observer New Review Sunday Magazine, The Guardian,
The Telegraph, The Daily Mail, Washington Post, The
Baltimore City Paper, i-D Magazine, Discovery Channel Inc.,
Rolling-Stone. His work, from the Struggle Civil Rights series
is in the permanent collections at the Reginald Lewis
Museum. This year he was named a finalist for the prestigious
National Gallery’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Prize and will
be featured in American Photography Annual 40 for his
second book 13-23 (Nighted Life Press), covering a decade of
Baltimore’s homicide rate. His international photographs
covering the collapse of the steel industry are the subject of
a solo show at the Museum of Industry in Baltimore. His next
book, Trumpland (Nighted Life Press), is out now.