Chronic Lyme, Disability Advocacy, & the Role of Art in Living with Illness

This panel is occasioned by the current CPW exhibition, , and will address issues central to that exhibition's content, including the role of art and disability advocacy in people's experience of chronic Lyme disease. Nowhere Land is an ongoing documentary project that examines, with fresh, creative, and broad range, the systemic failures of the U.S. medical system in addressing chronic tick-borne illnesses. After her own neurological Lyme diagnosis in 2021, artist Jiatong Lu began interviewing fellow Lyme patients, and through a combination of text, photographs, and archival documents, she highlights the fugitive and insidious nature of Lyme. Lu’s imagery, alternately abstract and concrete, reveals the profound physical, psychological, and financial toll of this often overlooked, hidden disease.

Moderated by Jessica D. Brier (Curator of Photography, Loeb Art Center, Vassar College), this panel will include Holly Ahern (Emeritus Professor of Microbiology, SUNY Adirondack and Chief Scientific Officer, Aces Diagnostics), Jiatong Lu (artist), and Mary Beth Pfeiffer (investigative reporter, Author of Lyme: The First Epidemic of Climate Change).

Holly Ahern is a microbiologist and nationally recognized expert in Lyme and tick-borne diseases, with over three decades of experience in microbiology education and clinical diagnostics. As a scientist and Lyme disease patient advocate, Holly has served on state and federal government committees, including the New York State Lyme and Tickborne Disease Working Group and the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Tickborne Disease Working Group. In her current position of Chief Scientific Officer at Aces Diagnostics, she leads scientific strategy, publication development, and external engagement to support the company’s flagship diagnostic test for Lyme disease, LymeSeek.

Jessica D. Brier is a curator and historian of art and design with a focus on modernism and the intersecting histories of photography, print, and design. She serves as curator of photography at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, where she co-organized the exhibitions Making a Life in Photography: Rollie McKenna (2024) and On the Grid: Ways of Seeing in Print (2022), both accompanied by catalogs co-published by Vassar College and Scala Arts Publishers. Her first book Typophoto: New Typography and the Reinvention of Photography was published in 2025 by University of Minnesota Press.

Jiatong Lu is a visual artist working with photography, video, and archives. Born and raised in Northwest China and currently based in New York, she holds an MFA in Photography, Video, and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts. Her work centers on people living outside dominant narratives. Moving between individual experience and public history, her practice examines how personal and collective trauma, systemic forces, and social inequality shape human life. Her current project, Nowhere Land, which focuses on the chronic Lyme disease community in the United States, was featured in TIME magazine. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including in New York, Chicago, Tucson, and Richmond in the United States, as well as in London, Berlin, Rome, Brussels, Shanghai, and Beijing. Her awards include the Award of Excellence from the 2025 Alexia Vision Grant, the 2024 JGS Fellowship for Photography from NYFA, the Winner of the 2024 LensCulture Art Photography Award, and the 2019 NYFA Artist Fellowship in Photography.

Mary Beth Pfeiffer, author of, has been an award-winning investigative journalist for three decades. A reporter who has specialized in social justice, environmental and health issues. Since 2012, Pfeiffer has become the leading U.S. investigative journalist on the growth of and controversies surrounding Lyme disease, a hidden menace that, she argues, has been fostered by a warming world while being vastly underestimated and poorly managed by American medicine. For her Lyme reporting, Pfeiffer was honored with a half-dozen awards, including the prestigious Sigma Delta Chi award in 2013 from the Society for Professional Journalists, one of her two Sigma Delta Chi awards.

Banner images: Jiatong Lu.

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