Chehalis Hegner

Chehalis Hegner was born in Chicago in 1961. At age five her family moved to a farm an hour northwest of the city.  Her early life was highly impacted by 60’s and 70’s culture, and included working on her parent’s large-scale organic gardening projects and tending the family tree farm. Her mother’s involvement in the women’s liberation movement and her father’s interest in Playboy culture greatly impacted the kinds of questions and images that would emerge years later in her photographic work.

Poet Naomi Shihab Nye writes: “Chehalis Hegner creates mesmerizing combustible windows through which longings, legends, fabulous and slightly ominous possibilities, peek their heads, and wink.”

About her art, Hegner writes: “Photography is meaningful to me because it allows me to be a witness. While our society structures life as a fragmented experience, making pictures addresses a basic need of mine to work toward a state of unity. Though I often use props such as wigs or gloves, I am not interested in creating fantasies, per se, except where these enactments help me to behold a larger truth. When an authentic experience of witnessing occurs, there is great purpose in the act of making photographs.”

In 2010 Chehalis Hegner received the Gjion Mili Photography Prize (Kosovo.)  She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe in galleries including The Photographic Resource Center (Boston), The Art Institute of Boston, Maryland Art Place (Baltimore, MD), St. Gauden’s National Historic Site (Cornish, NH), The Cultural Center  (Varigotti, Italy), The Interlochen Arts Academy (MI), the MIT Museum in Cambridge, and the National Gallery of Art in Kosovo.

Chehalis Hegner received her MFA in Visual Arts at the Art Institute of Boston in 2005. She is currently a member of the art department faculty at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.  Having an insatiable eye, she works concurrently on multiple portfolio projects.  Chehalis volunteers at the Lowell Humane Society; and serves on the board at the Photographic Resource Center on the campus of Boston University.

Bruce Myren

Bruce Myren is an artist and photographer based in Cambridge, MA. He holds a BFA in photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and earned his MFA in studio art, with a concentration on photography, from the University of Connecticut, Storrs in 2009.

Shown nationally and recently featured in Fraction Magazine, Myren has been included in group exhibitions at the Houston Center of Photography, TX and the William Benton Museum of Art, CT, among other venues. His latest solo exhibitions include showings at the Workspace Gallery, NE; the Special Collections Gallery of the Jones Library, MA; the Danforth Museum of Art, MA; and Gallery Kayafas, MA, where he is represented. Myren has presented on panels at the national conferences of the College Art Association and the Society for Photographic Education.

Currently, Myren is a Critic at the Rhode Island School of Design; Adjunct Faculty at the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University; a Visiting Lecturer of Art at Amherst College; and the Chair of the Northeast Region of the Society for Photographic Education.

In his work, Myren investigates issues of place and space, often via the exploration and employment of various locative systems, either literal or metaphoric. He is most interested in how macro perceptions relate to micro experiences of land and landscape. Myren’s recent series include a photographic investigation of the Fortieth Parallel of latitude; a piece documenting the view from every place he has lived to where he lives now; and a study via photographs, audio, and video of the poet Robert Francis’s one-person house in the woods of Amherst, MA.

Neal Rantoul

Neal Rantoul is a career artist and teacher. He has taught photography since 1971. He is past head of the Photography Program at Northeastern University, is a professor emeritus, and taught for thirteen years at Harvard University as well as several years at the New England School of Photography. He retired from Northeastern in January 2012. Rantoul has work in numerous public and private collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston); the DeCordova Sculpture Museum and Sculpture Park (Lincoln, MA); the Fogg Art Museum (Cambridge, MA); the High Museum (Atlanta, GA); the Kunsthaus (Zurich, Switzerland); the Center for Creative Photography (Tucson, AZ); and Princeton University (NJ). He is the recipient of many awards and grants, including a Whiting Foundation Fellowship; a Lightwork residency (Syracuse, NY); RSDF, FDP and IDF grants from Northeastern University; and he was a finalist twice for the Massachusetts Cultural Council award. Rantoul is a member of the Board of Directors of the PRC and is on the Board of Corporators at the Griffin Museum of Photography. He is an active exhibitor, workshop leader, portfolio reviewer, and consultant.

Glenn Ruga

Glenn Ruga is the Executive Director of the Photographic Resource Center and publisher and interim editor of Loupe magazine. Ruga received a BA from the University of Massachusetts in Social Thought and Political Economy and an MFA from Syracuse University in Graphic and Advertising Design. In 1984, he started Visual Communications, a graphic design firm working primarily with non-profit organizations. From 1993-2009 Ruga was the volunteer Executive Director of the Center for Balkan Development. In 2008 he founded SocialDocumentary.net, a website for documentary photographers to create online galleries of their work. Ruga has produced four traveling documentary photography exhibits, two of which were based on his work in the former Yugoslavia. In March 2012, Ruga was selected as a curator of the 2012 New York Photo Festival.