Alumni
Justin Maxon
Justin Maxon (1983) was born and raised in a number of small towns in the woods of northern California, where he grew up part-time on the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation. Maxon is an award winning visual storyteller, arts educator, and journalist that often utilizes social practice to examine social, political and environmental issues. He has received numerous awards for his photography and video projects, including two 1st place awards from World Press Photo, the Deeper Perspective Photographer of the Year at the Lucie Awards, the Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellowship, and the Alexia Foundation for World Peace Professional Grant. He was selected to participate in World Press Photo’s Joop Swart Masterclass. He has given more than 50 lectures and has taught photography workshops in over 8 different countries across the world. He was a teaching artist in an US State department sponsored cultural exchange program between the United States and South Africa. He has worked on featured stories for publications such as TIME, Rolling Stone, the New Yorker, Mother Jones, and NPR.
Livin’ the Dream, is a participatory media project undertaken in collaboration with artist’s Leslie Castellano and Laura Montagna, at the Humboldt County Correctional Facility in Eureka, CA. The project centered around the participants identifying an aspiration they wish to pursue once being released and constructing handmade objects, utilizing material available to them, symbolic of their goal.
