Announcing the 2025 Mid-Career Lens-Based Artist Initiative Recipients

We’re beyond excited to announce our 2025 Mid-Career Artists, Cinthya Santos Briones, Hannah Smith Allen, and Morgan Levy. The exhibition series will further BAXTER ST’s goal to foster belonging in the cultural sector by offering mid-career lens-based artists a solo exhibition opportunity.⁠ Each artists will receive a stipend, mentorship, and access to BAXTER ST’s community and programs to support the exhibition of an ongoing body of work. ⁠

Support for the Mid-career Lens-based Artist Initiative is provided by the Mellon Foundation.⁠

ABOUT CINTHYA SANTOS BRIONES

Cinthya Santos Briones is a visual artist, educator, and cultural worker with indigenous Nahua roots based in New York. She studied Ethnohistory and Anthropology and for ten years Cinthya worked as a researcher at the National Institute of Anthropology and History in México focused on issues on indigenous migration, codex, textiles and traditional medicine. Her multidisciplinary practice combines participatory art and collective storytelling, weaving together nonlinear narratives through photography, archival material, writing, ethnography, drawing, collage, embroidery, and popular education. Her work centers community voices and social engagement. Cinthya holds an MFA focus in creative writing and photography from Ithaca-Cornell University. And a certificate in Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism from the International Center of Photography (ICP). Currently she is an Adjunct Faculty at the Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and serves as Associate Director of Outreach and Partnerships at the Mexican Studies Institute, where she also leads interdisciplinary research projects. She has been a guest artist at institutions like Columbia University, the Institute of American Indian Arts, and Rutgers University. She is the recipient of fellowships and grants from the Magnum Foundation, En Foco, National Geographic Research and Exploration, We Woman, City Artist Corps, National Fund for Culture and the Arts of México, Wave Hill House Winter Residency, Mellon Artist Fellow at Hemispheric Institute in NYU University, BricLab Contemporary Art, Talk of the Town AIR Artist residency at Museo del Barrio, among others. Her work has been published in The New York Times, California Sunday Magazine, Vogue, Open Society Foundations, Buzzfeed, The Intercept, New Yorker, among others. As a writer, her texts have been published in academic and journalistic magazines such as NACLA and The Nation Magazine and newspapers such as La Jornada. She has also volunteered to accompany migrants to immigration courts and asylum proceedings, and serves as a guardian for unaccompanied migrant children.

ABOUT HANNAH SMITH ALLEN

Hannah Smith Allen is a Brooklyn, New York based artist whose work focuses on American political history and American lore. She is the recipient of a 2007 IPF grant from the Aaron Siskind Foundation, a 2010 Artist Fellowship in Photography from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and a 2011 A.I.M. Fellowship from the Bronx Museum of Art. She has participated in residencies at the Lower East Side Printshop and the Vermont Studio Center. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at AIR Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Good Children Gallery (New Orleans, LA) and Johnson Gallery (Middlebury, VT) and in numerous group exhibitions at venues such as Phoenix Art Museum, Wave Hill Cultural Center, and SF Camerawork. Allen holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts. She is an Associate Professor of Art at Adelphi University. Her book Borderlands (2021) is available via the VSW Press.

ABOUT MORGAN LEVY

Morgan is a photo-based artist and educator originally from Philadelphia, PA. She received her MFA in Photography from the Yale School of Art in 2020 and a BFA from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University in 2007. She is a recipient of the 2025 V&A Parasol Foundation Prize for Women in Photography and was a Barbara Deming Memorial Foundation and a Puffin Foundation grantee in 2024. In 2023 she was a finalist for the Aperture Portfolio Prize and participated in UnionDocs’ Research & Development lab. Her work is currently on view at Copeland Gallery in London as part of the 2025 V&A Parasol Foundation Prize and was recently included in the group exhibition On Land and Place at the Vermont Center for Photography. In 2024, her work was shown as a part of group exhibitions at the Throughline Collective in Houston, TX and Gallery Kannski in Reykjavik, Iceland. Previous group exhibitions include the Print Center, Philadelphia, PA (2021), Archive/Project Space, Pittsfield, MA (2021), and Society for Photographic Education, Philadelphia, PA (2018). Her photographs have been published in Capricious Magazine, Daylight, and It’s Nice That. She’s received commissions from numerous publications including The New York Times, the New Yorker, The Guardian, and Time. She’s taught at Moore College of Art and has lectured at the University of Michigan, Rutgers, and Yale. She is currently a part-time faculty member at Parsons School of Design and lives with her partner Håkan, their cat, and their child in Brooklyn, NY.