/ 2026 / Fine Art / Digitally Enhanced

• Prize
  Honorable Mention
• Photographer
  Dmitriy Gushchin, United States
• Date of Photograph
  2026
• Website
  https://dgartphoto.com/
• Instagram
  @dg_art_photo

Secret Life of Dolls explores the roles imposed on queer identities and the fragile boundary between performance and authenticity. Combining staged photography and digital composition, the image transforms a domestic interior into a theatrical space where objects become symbols of memory, expectation, and social convention. Borrowing the visual language of childhood and spectacle, the work reflects on how identity is constructed, concealed, and continually renegotiated within contemporary society.

Dmitriy Gushchin is a Boston-based artist working in staged photography and digital composition. Drawing on mythology, literature, and personal experience, his images explore queer identity, memory, and transformation through symbolic narratives and carefully constructed environments. Trained as a physicist and influenced by family traditions of healing, he combines photographic realism with allegorical storytelling to create works that move between the intimate and the monumental.

Awards Monmouth Museum Juror's Award (2025)
Selected Artist, Nagasaki Peace Exhibition, Nagasaki Prefectural Museum of Art, Japan (2026)
Selected Artist, September Competition, Alexandria Museum of Art, Louisiana (2025 and 2026)
Selected Artist, Humanity 2027, CICA Museum, South Korea (2027)
Selected Artist, Proud+, The Studio Door, San Diego (2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026)
Selected Artist, Cape Cod Museum of Art Annual Exhibition(2024 and 2025)
Works held in the permanent collection of the Nagasaki Prefectural Museum of Art.