Zoraida
Lopez
Diago
ABOUT ME
Zoraida Lopez-Diago is an photographer, curator, and co-creator of Women Picturing Revolution. Her photographs and installations have been exhibited in galleries including Rush Arts, New York, Whitewall Gallery, New York, and the Paul Baldwell Gallery in Medellin, Colombia and published in Vivienne Westwood’s “100 Days of Active Resistance,” Of Note Magazine, Good Magazine, Hudson Valley Magazine, World Policy Institute Journal, Women’s Voices for Change, El Diario, and Democracy Now. She lectures on her work at institutions including Trinity College, Mt. Holyoke College, City College of New York, and the University of Antioquia, Medellin, Colombia.
Zoraida has curated photography exhibitions in Latin America and the United States. Most recently, Zoraida was the assistant curator of the Picturing Black Girlhood Exhibition, an exhibition focused on the identities and important contributions of Black girls in the United States sponsored by Columbia University. She also co-curated Women as Witness, an exhibition that revealed how women across the globe u document resilience, resistance, and survival through photography.
In 2011, Zoraida received a grant co-sponsored by the United States Embassy to teach photography to youth in Medellin and create an installation based on the UN Declaration of Children’s Rights. During her time in Colombia, she lived in a maximum security women’s prison in Medellin, taught photography to 12 inmates, and curated exhibitions, in both prison and galleries, based on this work; she returned to Colombia in January 2013 to continue her work, and focused on ways to improve community opinion, as a whole, on the incarcerated.
In November 2016 at ICP Zoraida co-taught a course and co-hosted a panel entitled Women Picturing Revolution (WPR) which she co-created with independent photographer and educator Lesly Deschler Canossi. Women Picturing Revolution surveyed female photographers who document war, conflicts, crises, and revolution in private realms and public spaces. Special focus was placed on the impact that conflict has on women and girls. In March 2017 she co taught a seminar at IRAAS (Columbia University's Institute for Research in African-American Studies) entitled Women Picturing Revolution: Focus on Africa and the African Diaspora.
She has taught photography workshops to young boys and girls living in juvenile detention centers in New England, completed an artist residency teaching photography to adolescent girls in the South Bronx, and recently received a received an Individual Artist’s Commission grant administered by Arts Mid-Hudson mission to photograph the children of migrant farm workers in upstate New York.