Aline and Alexa reprise their roles as our jurors
in 2023 for our 20th Anniversary Show!
Aline Smithson is a visual artist, editor, and educator based in Los Angeles, California. She is best known for her conceptual portraiture and a practice that uses humor and pathos to explore the performative potential of photography. Growing up in the shadow of Hollywood, her work is influenced by the elevated unreal. She has exhibited widely including over 40 solo shows at a variety of international institutions and her work has been featured in publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, and PDN.
Smithson is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Lenscratch, a daily journal on photography. In 2012, she received the Rising Star Award through the Griffin Museum of Photography for her contributions to the photographic community and she also received the prestigious Excellence in Teaching Award from CENTER. In 2014 and 2019, Smithson’s work was selected for the Critical Mass Top 50. In
2015, the Magenta Foundation published her first significant monograph, Self & Others: Portrait as Autobiography, and in 2016, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum commissioned Smithson to create a series of portraits for the upcoming Faces of Our Planet Exhibition. In 2018 and 2019, her work was exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery in London as part of the Taylor Wessing Prize. Kris
Graves Projects published her book, LOST II: Los Angeles and included her work in SOLACE and On
Death. Peanut Press released her monograph, Fugue State, in Fall of 2021. In 2022, Smithson was
recognized as a Hasselblad Heroine.
Alexa Dilworth (she/her), an independent editor and writer, began her career as managing editor of DoubleTalk magazine at the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) at Duke University. She then became the publishing director and senior editor at CDS, where she also directed the awards program, including the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize program and the CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography. She edited over seventy books, most recently Road Through Midnight: A Civil Rights Memorial by Jessica Ingram, Where We Find Ourselves: The Photographs of Hugh Mangrum, 1897-1922 by Margaret Sartor and Alex Harris, Reality Radio: Telling Stories in Sound, by John Biewen and Alexa Dilworth, Aunties: The Seven Summers of Alevtina and Ludmila by Nadia Sablin, and Legendary: Inside the House Ballroom Scene by Gerard H. Gaskin.
Dilworth has a BA and an MA in English from University of Florida and an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa.