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Interview

Dialogues: Natasha Egan

February 1, 2017

This interview with Natasha Egan is part of MAS Context Dialogues, a series of conversations with Chicago-based designers hosted by Stephen Killion.

Contributors

Although not a Chicago native, Natasha Egan believes that we all should consider the city she now calls home an international city. As an educator at Columbia College and director of their Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP), Natasha works to help better define how we understand our world, both locally and beyond, through image.

Since starting at MoCP as a curator in 2000, Natasha has helped organize numerous exhibits that have a particularly unique lens on culture and social issues. Examples include the Nollywood Portraits: A Radical Beauty, in which Iké Udéand captured portraits of sixty-four personalities from the prolific Nigerian film industry, and Petcoke: Tracing Dirty Energy, a project that helped raise awareness and shine a light on the dangerous compounds created as a result of oil refining in the Chicago region and beyond.

Natasha believes that artists have a unique ability to help present our world through unique perspectives, and through her work has advanced a dialogue between the photographers and artists that capture glimpses of the world around us and the officials that can help change it for the better.

Interview published in February, 2017.

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Dandy Lion: (Re)Articulating Black Masculine Identity, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, 2015. © MoCP.

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Petcoke: Tracing Dirty Energy, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, 2016. © MoCP.

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Petcoke: Tracing Dirty Energy, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, 2016. © MoCP.

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Nollywood Portraits: A Radical Beauty, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, 2016. © MoCP.

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Nollywood Portraits: A Radical Beauty, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, 2016. © MoCP.

Intro Song

“Strella, Sing a Singsong to the Moon” by Studio Noir is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.

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Contributor Bios

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Natasha Egan

Natasha Egan is the executive director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP) at Columbia College, Chicago. From 2000 until 2011 she was the museum’s associate director and curator. She has organized over fifty exhibitions with a focus on contemporary Asian art and artists concerned with societal issues, such as the environment, war, and economics. For over a decade, she taught in the photography and humanities departments at Columbia College Chicago, and holds a BA in Asian studies, MA in museum studies, and MFA in fine art photography.

Stephen Killion

Formally trained as an architect, Stephen Killion uses his parallel understanding in both the architectural and graphic design discipline to advance an ongoing curiosity in how users inhabit, interact and understand the built environment through design. In addition to his award winning multidisciplinary design background, he has showcased and highlighted notable projects by acting as a contributing writer/editor for Mark Magazine, Architizer and Design Bureau.