CENTER's Project Launch Grant

CENTER's Project Launch Grant is sponsored by CENTER. This grant is awarded to talented photographers working with a fine art series or a documentary project to help them complete their respective projects and provide opportunities for professional development, press, and dissemination.

Launch Grant — CENTER Santa Fe NM The Project Launch Grant supports a complete or nearly completed documentary or fine art series. The $5,000 grant package includes professional development and public presentation opportunities.

• Group Exhibition at CENTER • Review Santa Fe participation • Publication in LENSCRATCH • Professional Development Seminars access • Inclusion in printed Program Guide • Inclusion in the Online Gallery & Archive Diane Waggoner • Curator, Department of Photographs, National Gallery of Art Diane Waggoner is curator and acting head of the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

After earning a PhD in art history from Yale University, she joined the National Gallery in 2004, where she has organized or co-curated numerous exhibitions, including The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888–1978 (2007), The Pre-Raphaelite Lens: British Photography and Painting, 1848–1875 (2010), Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design, 1848–1900 (2013), East of the Mississippi: Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Photography (2017), and James Van Der Zee’s Photographs: A Portrait of Harlem (2021).

In 2020, she published the monograph Lewis Carroll’s Photography and Modern Childhood (Princeton University Press). Her current project, Beneath the Surface: Mining and American Photography, co-curated with Kristen Gaylord, Herzfeld Curator of Photography and New Media Arts at the Milwaukee Museum of Art, will be on view at the National Gallery, May 23-August 23, 2026.

Marcus DeSieno • Geography of Disappearance: Migrant Deaths on the US/Mexico Border “The United Nations has declared the border between the United States and Mexico to be the deadliest land crossing in the world and a humanitarian crisis. Thousands of men, women, and children have died crossing the over 1,900 mile border through brutal deserts and impassible mountains with harsh climate conditions year-round.

The US government strategically uses draconian policies here that follow a philosophy of “prevention through deterrence,” forcefully directing migrants into unforgiving terrain where they wander for days in the elements. These policies are specifically meant to maim and kill. Many of these migrants are sometimes never found as they die in the vast emptiness of the wilderness.

The earth reclaims their bodies, and they disappear. Nature is used as an executioner by proxy. ” Thank you to our Award and Grant package, publication and exhibition supporters.