An active member of the Society for Photographic Education (SPE), Malina Chavez received the 2013 Jeannie Pearce Award for Innovations in Imaging. Chavez received her MFA from Duke University’s Experimental and Documentary Arts program and graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Science in Photography from Middle Tennessee State University. 

She explores ideas of connectedness, permeability of identity, personal desires, and loss in a world full of mediated social programming. She is interested in the dichotomies of public/private and personal/political as experienced within real and ‘virtual’ worlds. Her artistic practice includes photographic art – computational, street photography, historic processes, photojournalism – as well as experimental film and video, and collage; and often uses found footage, Google Street View and open-source surveillance.

Her work has been shown at SPE national headquarters, Johalla Projects for Filter Photo’s Archetype Drift, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Portland Underground Film Festival, Chianciano Art Museum in Italy and the online and catalogue editions of the Kiernan Gallery.

She is talking about herself in third person, which makes her feel kind of awkward.