Diné in Focus Photography Collective: Panel Discussion

Join the Block Museum for a conversation with four Diné (Navajo) photographers and scholars whose work documents contemporary life across the Navajo Nation. Working collectively through Diné in Focus, the panelists challenge longstanding visual stereotypes that portray Indigenous peoples through static or romanticized imagery, instead highlighting the diversity and complexity of Diné experiences, landscapes, and political realities.

Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Teresa Montoya’s Tó Łitso (Yellow Water): Ten Years after the Gold King Mine Spill, this panel features Teresa Montoya (University of Chicago), Shayla Blatchford (Anti-Uranium Mapping Project), Andrew Curley (University of Arizona), and Majerle Lister (University of Arizona). Together they will discuss photography as a tool for storytelling, education, and community advocacy, reflecting on the ethics of photography within Diné communities and the role of visual media in supporting environmental health and sovereignty.

Participation level – light, audience members can choose to participate in the Q&A at the close of the program.

Programs are open to all, on a first-come first-served basis. RSVPs are not required, but are appreciated.

About the Speakers:

Teresa Montoya (Diné) is a photographer, social scientist, and Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her research and creative practice focus on contemporary problems of environmental governance in relation to historical legacies of land dispossession and resource extraction across the Indigenous Southwest. Her work has been published in the American Journal of Public Health, Anthropology Now, Cultural Anthropology, Journal for the Anthropology of North America, Ecology and Society, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Visual Anthropology Review, and Water International. She has curatorial experience in various institutions, including the Field Museum where she served as a guest curator for Native Truths: Our Voices, Our Stories. She is the founding member of Diné in Focus, a collective dedicated to Diné photojournalism through a Diné lens. Website: https://teresamontoya.squarespace.com/

Shayla Blatchford is a photographer and interdisciplinary artist whose work examines the intersections of land, memory, and environmental justice in the American Southwest. Her practice blends documentary photography, mapping, oral histories, and archival research to explore the complex histories of uranium mining and its lasting effects on Indigenous communities. She is the creator of the Anti-Uranium Mapping Project, a long-term artistic and research initiative that uses visual storytelling and counter-mapping to challenge dominant narratives about land use, nuclear development, and environmental responsibility. Through this project, Blatchford creates spaces for community storytelling while connecting historical research with contemporary lived experiences. Blatchford received her BFA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography from Santa Fe University of Art and Design. Her work has been supported by the Creative Capital Technology Grant and the Anonymous Was A Woman Environmental Arts Grant through the New York Foundation of the Arts. Her photography and research have been presented through exhibitions, workshops, and educational programming, where she engages audiences in conversations about the role of art in shaping public understanding of environmental history and social change.

Andrew Curley (Diné) is an Associate Professor of Geography, Development and Environment at the University of Arizona. His research explores how extractive industries produce a particular kind of colonizing relationship that expands social difference and creates new cultural understandings of resources within indigenous communities. Building on ethnographic research, his publications speak to how Indigenous communities understand coal, energy, land, water, infrastructure, and development in an era of energy transition and climate change. He earned his PhD in developmental sociology from Cornell University.

Majerle Lister is a Diné PhD Candidate at the University of Arizona, whose research interest ranges from Indigenous geography, Native American Studies, and Critical Agrarian Studies. His research explores the development discourses and practices within the Former Bennett Freeze Area in Western Navajo Nation. As a photographer, he is interested in capturing the mundane and candid aspects of Diné life.

This event is co-sponsored by the Gichigamiin Indigenous Nations Museum and supported by a grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art.

Image credit: Teresa Montoya (Diné, born 1984), Tó Łitso #18 (Yellow Water #18), from the series Tó Łitso (Yellow Water), 2016, printed 2024, photograph. Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Block Board of Advisors Endowment Fund purchase. 2024.22.18.

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