ARTISTS

Dean Majd

Guest Curatorial Program (2026)

Hard Feelings

Dean Majd (b. 1990) is a self-taught, lens-based artist born and based in Queens, New York. Born to
Palestinian immigrants, he studied international relations with a focus on the Middle East at CUNY,
The City College of New York. Majd began forming his intimate and cinematic visual language after
being given his first camera at seven years old by his mother. His diaristic work engages with violence
as an imposed center-point of one’s life, focusing on repressed, negative emotions within
contemporary masculinity in relation to addiction and self-destruction. His work also explores the
complexities of the Arab-American dichotomy and the Palestinian diaspora in relation to apartheid.
Majd has been profiled by Aperture, MATTE Magazine, AnOther Magazine, and GQ Middle East. His
editorial work has appeared in The New York Times, Vogue, and New York Magazine, and Dazed, in
which his work made the cover of the fall 2025 issue. Majd’s work has been exhibited at the Museum
of the City of New York in the exhibition New York Now: Home (2023), and he has lectured at the
International Center of Photography. In fall 2025 he was an artist-in-residence at the Centerfor
Photography at Woodstock. He is a recipient of the 2025 En Foco Fellowship Award, and he will be a
resident at Light Work in Syracuse, New York, in spring 2026. He is passionate about cinema,
immensely devoted to his friends, and a proud New Yorker. He believes that love, above all else, is the
driving force behind everything he does.

Hard Feelings, the debut solo exhibition by Palestinian-American lens-based artist Dean Majd.
Curated by Marley Trigg Stewart, BAXTER ST’s 2025-26 Guest Curatorial Recipient, the
show will be on view February 4 to April 2, 2026.

Prompted by a childhood friend’s sudden passing in 2016, just a week after they
reconnected, Majd began documenting the dynamics within his predominately male circle –
an insular graffiti crew in his hometown of Queens, New York. Made overthe course of a
decade, and largely at night and with point-and-shoot cameras, the photographs oscillate
between moments ofrevelry and violence, creating a nuanced portrayal of masculinity, the
cyclical nature of trauma, and the power of empathy.

Hard Feelings brings together works that offer an unflinching testament to lives deemed
invisible yet demand to be seen. Majd’s comprehensive archive of the group’s rituals, its
frictions and intimacies, began innocently as a record of truth; his lens offered a channel for
their collective grief, the impetus to deepen his burgeoning relationship with the camera.
Moving between documentarian and participant, Majd complicates conventional ideas of
distance, authorship, and complicity. Overtime the boundaries between himself, his friends,
and his camera dissolved. The tension in the images is palpable, dominated by the emotional
awareness that we as viewers have become privy to things Majd cannot unsee. Wounds cut
deep, psychic or otherwise, but Majd’s photographs also remind us that scars are signs of
healing.

Invoking the spirituality and tenebrism of Baroque painting through deep shadows and sudden illumination, as well as a lineage of photographers favoring diaristic intimacy over
traditional documentary distance, Majd has cultivated a visual language that is both formally
rigorous and emotionally bare. Withoutromanticizing their experiences, the interplay of
chroma and contrast form love letters to his collaborators, to Queens and to New York City
itself.

Photographed across the years before and after the COVID-19 pandemic, Majd
mythologizes the stories of lives ravaged by the ever changing nature of New York City. His
lens immortalizes the passing of friends, the chasing of ghosts, nocturnal quests for ego
death, and masculine rites of passage – trials often faced by the men of colorin Majd’s life,
crafting a legacy forthose often unseen and unconsidered. Through trust, his friends
-themselves part of a lost generation – bore their cuts and tears to him as affirmations of
their existences.

In Hard Feelings, wounds and bruises become tender offerings. The boundary between
violence and vulnerability dissipates, with Majd’s camera insisting on presence – on seeing
fully. The photographs become an acknowledgment of pain and spiritual catharsis. His
empathetic eye transforms his lens into a mirrorthatreflects his sitters’ darkest internal
conflicts, and a space forthem to face their own shadows; a place to express repressed
emotions; a moment of vulnerability forthose taught they must be invulnerable to survive.

This odyssey resolves as an invitation for hope and healing for all those willing to engage with
their hard feelings.
Majd’s first book, Hard Feelings, will be published by Aperture in 2027.
Hard Feelings is presented in dedication to the memory of Subash “Suba” Tamang.