Kat Thompson and Nathyfa Michel named 2025 WOPHA Artists-in-Residence

WOPHA / 08.12.2025

Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA) is thrilled to announce the recipients of its 2025 Artist-in-Residence program: Kat Thompson and Nathyfa Michel.

Since its launch in 2020, the WOPHA Artist-in-Residence program has been a vital platform for supporting emerging and mid-career women and non-binary artists working with photography. Presented in partnership with El Espacio 23, this month-long residency provides dedicated time and space for creative development, enabling artists to immerse themselves in research, experimentation, and community engagement while connecting with Miami’s vibrant cultural landscape.

Two artists are selected annually through an international open call, juried by WOPHA leadership and industry experts. For 2025, one of the residencies is awarded in partnership with La Station Culturelle to support an artist from the French Caribbean.

The 2025 WOPHA Artist-in-Residence jury included:

• Taous Dahmani, London-based French, British, and Algerian art historian, writer, and curator specializing in photography.
• Marina Amada, independent art curator and former Chief Operating Officer of KYOTOGRAPHIE in Japan.
• Daria Tuminas, independent curator based in The Netherlands and co-founder of Growing Pains, a foundation that publishes photobooks supporting women and non-binary artists.
• Éline Gourgues, independent curator and co-director of La Station Culturelle in Martinique.
• Adama Delphine Fawundu, 2021 WOPHA Artist-in-Residence, visual artist, co-founder of MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora, and Assistant Professor at Columbia University.

The 2025 WOPHA Artists-in-Residence are:

Kat Thompson is a multidisciplinary artist and educator based in Virginia. She holds an MFA in Photography and Film from Virginia Commonwealth University and a BFA in Photography from George Mason University. Rooted in her Jamaican heritage, Thompson’s lens-based practice spans photography, textiles, sculptural collage, and installation to explore Black selfhood within the African Diaspora. Her work addresses dual identity, diaspora, and memory, drawing from personal and archival materials to trace familial migration and cultural continuity. Through layered narratives, she bridges personal experience with collective memory while imagining both present realities and speculative futures. Thompson has exhibited at the 1780 Gallery and Page Bond Gallery (Richmond, VA); Visible Records (Charlottesville, VA); the Fenwick and Gillespie Galleries at George Mason University (Fairfax, VA); and the Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art (Reston, VA). She is currently a 2023–2025 Hamiltonian Artists Fellow in Washington, D.C.

Thompson will examine Caribbean archives and their varied preservation across different U.S. states, with Miami as a key case study. Engaging with Miami’s Caribbean community, she will investigate how memory is safeguarded, how historical documentation shifts across regions, and the role of photography in sustaining diasporic narratives.

Nathyfa Michel is a Caribbean photographer born in 1994 in Réunion Island, to a Guianese father and a French mother. Her childhood, shaped by movements between France and French Guiana, heightened her awareness of issues related to mixed heritage and diasporic trajectories. She returned to live in French Guiana in 2019 after Anglicist studies between Paris and New Orleans. Self-taught in photography, her practice focuses on the intricate layers of Caribbean and Amazonian identity at the intersection of intimate and collective history. She explores dynamics of transmission, searching for a “home” reinvented through rhizomatic and hybrid imagination. Her work blends archives, photography, writing, and collage to investigate the circulation and transformation of memories in diasporic and post-colonial contexts. Member of the Fotokontré 2022 residency program and finalist of the Filles de la Photo mentorship in 2024, she exhibited in 2023 at the Rencontres Photographiques de Guyane, and in 2024 at the B-Home Gallery in Senegal during the Off of the Biennale de Dakar, at the WOPHA Congress in Miami, and at the Fototras festival in Guadeloupe. In 2024, she received an Individual Creation Grant from the DRAC Guyane for the development of her project Dans ma chair, un pays.

Michel will continue developing Dans ma chair, un pays, a project on home, belonging, and generational memory rooted in the impending loss of her childhood home in French Guiana. During the residency, she will explore Miami’s Black and Caribbean communities, deepen her analog film practice, and expand her tactile, material approach to photography.

The 2025 WOPHA Artist-in-Residence 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 include El Espacio 23, Green Space Miami, and La Station Culturelle. Additional support was provided by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States.

About

La Station Culturelle is a leading cultural agency and resource center in Martinique dedicated to supporting, creating, and promoting the visual arts across the insular and continental Caribbean. With expertise in artistic programming, cultural mediation, and international project development, the organization connects artists, institutions, and cultural stakeholders to foster Caribbean talent and enhance the visibility of regional art on a global stage. Its commitment to photography is embodied in FOTO KONTRÉ, a program that enriches the regional scene through residencies, masterclasses, exhibitions, and professional support for photographers.

El Espacio 23 is a contemporary art space founded by collector and philanthropist Jorge M. Pérez. Located within a repurposed 28,000 square foot warehouse in Miami’s Allapattah neighborhood, El Espacio 23 serves artists, curators, and the general public with regular exhibitions, residencies, and a variety of special projects drawn from the Pérez Collection.