The Relevance of Film and Historic Processes with Dale Rio

Dale Rio, Joseph Kirando, 2018 Maaasai Olympics, Kenya

Dale Rio, Lydia from "Look At Me" series of environmental portraits of survivors of sexual assault taken from a place of strength.

Dale Rio, Assateague, photographs of coastal landscapes affected by climate change.

Thursday, October 8th at 7 pm ET

Does film photography and historic processes have relevance in our contemporary world? For photographers like Dale Rio, traditional processes are not only relevant, they are essential to their work, especially their issue-based projects.

Dale Rio is a visual artist whose lens-based and lensless photographic work explores issues such as mortality and man’s relationship with the natural world.  Utilizing film and historic photographic processes, Dale’s vision expands both outward – with  observation and documentation of the world around her – and inward with personal  reflection upon those observations. 

Dale received an MFA in Photography from Pratt Institute in 1996 and was awarded a Fulbright Travel Grant and the Miguel Vinciguerra Grant the following year. Upon her return to the States, Dale embarked upon a varied photographic career that has included freelancing, serving as a master darkroom printer, teaching, editing, and curating.    

In 2018, Dale was the recipient of a Windgate Scholarship, which allowed her to  study the Daguerreotype process at Penland School of Craft. From 2020 – 2021, Dale will be an artist-in-residence at Connecticut’s Farmington Valley Arts Center, where she will explore the materiality of historic processes such as wet plate.   

Dale has been involved with numerous photo and art centers across the country, and in 2015, she co-founded The Halide Project, a Philadelphia-based non-profit  whose mission is the support of traditional photographic practices.