Carla Shapiro is a photographer and educator based in upstate New York. Her photographic projects explore loss and longing, memory and nostalgia, womanhood, aging, and the human condition.
She has received many awards, one of which was, The New York Foundation for the Arts Photography Fellowship for images her great aunts, “ANITA and ESTHER.” She created collages that explored the universal theme of aging. She received her second NYFA grant for “TIMELESS TASKS,” a series of images she made with a pinhole camera that contemplated women’s place in the world through our work at home. She created this work at The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo and The Ucross Foundation, working uninterrupted at an artist’s retreat. She also received a Golden Light Award from The Maine Photographic Workshops.
In “To Capture a Shadow", she received a first-place award from Maine Photographic Workshops and a Pratt Development Fund to travel to Madagascar to photograph the Baobab trees. Shapiro presented this work with an exhibition at The Center of Photography at Woodstock.
Shapiro is currently creating work about her depression. It feels timely with an epidemic challenging this country.
She is an Associate Professor in the Graduate Department at Pratt Institute and at Pace University. She received a BFA from Syracuse University, then attended ICP and began her career as an artist.