Juror’s Bio – Maria Kelly, Assistant Curator of Photography, High Museum of Art, Atlanta

Maria L. Kelly is the Assistant Curator of Photography at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. During her time at the High, Maria has helped organize more than twenty photography installations, including exhibitions featuring the work of Helen Levitt, Abelardo Morell, Sheila Pree Bright, Paula Chamlee, Sarah Hobbs, Wynn Bullock, Gordon Parks and Thomas Struth, among others. She is the venue curator for André Kertész: Postcards from Paris at the High, and she recently co-curated an exhibition on women photographers throughout history, titled Underexposed: Women Photographers from the Collection (2021). Other recent projects include her master’s thesis at Columbia University, The Unfixed Landscape: Meghann Riepenhoff & Matthew Brandt (2018), which considered experimental bodies of work by both artists within the context of the history of photography and the Land Art movement, and an exhibition, What Is Near: Reflections on Home (2016), that featured the work of five southern women photographers exploring the notions of home and memory.

Maria holds an M.A. from Columbia University and a B.A. from the University of Georgia, both in art history. Previously, she worked at the Brooklyn Museum and The Sir Elton John Photography Collection and has held internships at The Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Georgia Museum of Art.