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.
Dandy Lion: (Re)Articulating Black Masculine Identity, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, 2015. © MoCP.
Petcoke: Tracing Dirty Energy, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, 2016. © MoCP.
Petcoke: Tracing Dirty Energy, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, 2016. © MoCP.
Nollywood Portraits: A Radical Beauty, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, 2016. © MoCP.
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.
