Meet the 2025 WOPHA Research Fellowship Recipients: José Antonio Navarrete and Shirine Saad

WOPHA / 08.12.2025

We are thrilled to unveil José Antonio Navarrete and Shirine Saad as the recipients of the third cycle of the WOPHA Research Fellowship.

The WOPHA Research Fellowship annually supports two emerging or established authors in producing scholarly essays on women and non-binary voices in photography. The program fosters innovative and diverse approaches from critical and historical to speculative and autobiographical. The 2025 fellows were selected through an open call juried by Katy Hundertmark, Managing Editor of Foam Magazine and curator at Foam.

José Antonio Navarrete is a Cuban-born independent curator and researcher in visual arts and culture based in Miami. He has contributed extensively to newspapers, cultural and academic journals, catalogues, anthologies, and edited books, and has authored several publications. He served as curator of photography at the National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana (1983–1988), general curator of the Encuentro de Fotografía Latinoamericana, Caracas (1993), and held curatorial leadership positions at major Venezuelan museums. From 1997 to 2006, he edited Extracámara, a magazine specializing in Latin American photography. He has been part of international academic initiatives, including the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories program, and currently directs the curatorial program at ArtMedia Gallery, Miami.

María Teresa de Rojas and Josefina Tarafa: the photographers of El Monte (1954). Navarrete’s research revisits Lydia Cabrera’s El Monte (1954), considered both the “Afro-Cuban bible” and a groundbreaking ethnographic work, through its photography. Focusing on images by Josefina Tarafa and María Teresa de Rojas, the study re-centers the book’s visual appendix, using contemporary critical frameworks to expand its interpretation. It examines how Cabrera, Tarafa, and de Rojas, three Cuban and Caribbean women deeply engaged with Afro-descendant culture, developed alternative models to dominant modernity, contributing to an overlooked chapter in modern Cuban and Caribbean women’s photography.

Shirine Saad is a Beirut-born journalist, programmer, and DJ focused on culture and activism. They recently taught Arts Journalism and Criticism at Brown University, where they are the Founding Editor of a new multimedia arts journal, MOVEMENTS. They are a PhD candidate in Philosophy, Art and Social Thought at the European Graduate School. Their first academic essay on Arab feminist and queer art is forthcoming at Routledge, and a book with Saqi Press will be published next year. They serve on the Advisory Council at Recess Art in Brooklyn.

Shattering Form as Feminist Photographic Resistance examines contemporary feminist and queer photography from the SWANA region, featuring artists such as Sheida Soleimani, Randa Mirza, Myriam Boulos, Sophia Al Maria, Tanya Habjouka, Farah Al Qasimi, and Samra Habib. Saad explores how these artists respond to the current landscape of war and upheaval, pushing the boundaries of photography as a medium and a mode of resistance against aesthetic regimes of repression and domination. By engaging deeply with photographic history and theory, these practitioners reveal the violence of the present moment while alchemizing poetry from the ruins. Building on several years of research, this focused study on photography will juxtapose their practices with those of regional and global pioneers, illuminating their innovation and urgency. The project will also draw connections between these photographic interventions and parallel strategies emerging in dance, sculpture, music, literature, and performance, mapping an interdisciplinary terrain of feminist and queer resistance.

The WOPHA Research Fellowship program is made possible through the support of the Pérez CreARTE Grant Program by The Jorge M. Pérez Family Foundation at The Miami Foundation and the Green Family Foundation. Cultural partners are The Betsy Hotel and Green Space Miami.