VMFA Names Qiana Mestrich and Shikeith Winners of Inaugural Aaron Siskind Photography Awards

RICHMOND, Virginia — The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts on Thursday announced the first recipients of its new Aaron Siskind Award for Photography, naming artists Qiana Mestrich and Shikeith as winners of the $25,000 prizes.

“Supporting artists is a core part of our mission, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is proud to support the practice of photography as an important means of creative expression,” said museum Director and CEO Alex Nyerges. “The Aaron Siskind Awards are purposeful and transformative — enabling recipients to pursue major artistic projects.”

A panel of photography and visual-arts professionals reviewed 817 submissions before selecting the two artists. Jurors included Kaitlin Booher of the Columbus Museum of Art, Aperture Senior Editor Brendan Embser and photographer and scholar Carla Williams. They evaluated entries based on artistic vision, the significance of proposed projects and each artist’s contribution to contemporary photography.

Williams said of both Mestrich and Shikeith: “Their commitment not only to their individual creative practices, but to our collective knowledge and understanding of photography is both expansive and inspiring. Their highly personal, socially engaged imagery draws new voices into conversations about aesthetics, identity and history.”

Mestrich, an interdisciplinary artist and photo historian based in New York, draws on her upbringing as the daughter of immigrants from Panama and Croatia. Her work explores themes of Black mixed-race identity, motherhood and women’s labor.

“Limited by the minimal photographs I could find online of the corporate labor history of women of color in the United States, I began to create my own speculative representations,” Mestrich said. 

The project she submitted, The Reinforcements, grows out of a digital archive documenting the office labor of women of color from the mid-1960s to the early 2000s. With limited historical images available, Mestrich said she turned to speculative representations. Booher described the resulting collages — which combine office supplies with photographs of Black women entering the 1970s corporate workforce — as “punchy and surreal,” noting that the work highlights the limits of mainstream feminist narratives.

Shikeith, a multidisciplinary artist based in Pittsburgh, investigates the sociopolitical forces shaping the psychological experiences of marginalized communities.

“My photographic practice is an ongoing dialogue with the past, centering the Black masculine body as a site of deep spiritual and psychological inquiry,” Shikeith said. “In my images, Black men often appear with their eyes closed, a recurring gesture toward interiority, and in states of profuse sweating or ‘spilling,’ a visual metaphor for both physical release and emotional catharsis.” 

Drawing on African diaspora spiritual traditions, he centers the Black masculine body in his photography. His winning project, People Who Die Bad Don’t Stay in the Ground, examines how historical trauma continues to reverberate in the present. Embser called the work a “profound statement about Black inheritance in the 21st century.”

Dr. Sarah Kennel, the museum’s Aaron Siskind Curator of Photography and director of the Raysor Center, praised the strength of submissions as demonstrating the vibrancy contemporary photography, as well as the winners.

“Both Qiana Mestrich and Shikeith approach their practices with extraordinary thoughtfulness and depth, using photography to probe urgent questions of identity, memory and history,” she said. “Their work exemplifies the rigor and creativity that Aaron Siskind championed, and I am thrilled to launch this prize with such remarkable artists.”