The Year of the Coronavirus

• Prize
  Shortlist
• Photographer
  Sylvia de Swaan, United States
• Date of Photograph
  2020
• Category
  Americas
• Studio
  photography
• Image Location
  USA
• Socials

My five submitted images were all taken within the month of April 2020 in the city of Utica, NY where I have lived since the mid 1980s. It's a post industrial town, that attracts artists to come here to work on ambitious projects at an organization called Sculpture Space (of which I was the founding director) and its become a multicultural hub. a welcoming by refugees from all the worlds' war zones. The city's weak point is its downtown, which for many years has suffered from aging infrastructure and poor city planning. Plans are currently underway to build a downtown hospital.

• Biography
  I’m a Romanian born art and documentary photographer who has lived and worked in Mexico, Europe and the United States. I work on long-term exploratory projects that are informed by themes of transience and loss, individual and collective memory and identity; the state of the world and the neighborhoods where I live. My longest running body of work, titled “Return,” consisting a series of solitary train Journeys through post communist Eastern Europe, to explore the terrain of my early childhood. which my mother, sister and I traversed as stateless refugees after WWII.
• Awards
  My photographic works have earned me grants, residencies and fellowships from a variety of sources, including Art Matters, The Aaron Siskind Foundation, CEC/ArtsLink travel grants, Light Work, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art; Austrian Ministry of Culture, Constance Saltonstall Foundation, Anderson Ranch Art Center, four fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (1994, 1998/2008/2016) and the Creative Artists Project Grant by the Society for Photographic Education. My work have been exhibited regionally, nationally and internationally.