Jacques Nkinzingabo
Jacques Nkinzingabo is a DJ, music producer, and self-taught photographer born and based in Kigali, Rwanda. He co-founded the Kwanda Art Foundation with the aim to build the photography community in Rwanda by establishing, educating, and improving knowledge about the medium. He is committed to building the art community both in Rwanda and in an international context. He established the Kigali Center for Photography, both a gallery and a training space to enable exchange, reflection, meeting, listening and the practice and development of new work. His work focuses on cultural diversity, migration, memories and identity issues. Nkinzingabo has been exhibited worldwide. He is currently showing his long-term Project “The Country in Progress” with WordPress Foundation at the Afrika Museum Colonial in Berg en Dal in the Netherlands.
Nkinzingabo co-founded Learning for Change. Today, he continues to teach photography classes in schools and communities across Rwanda. He is a leader in Kigali’s thriving underground music scene and a founding member of Team Kumba. He sees Team Kumba’s music as part of the unifying sound of a new generation, aware of its past but looking to the future with fearless confidence.
Bill Bamberger
Bill Bamberger’s photographs explore large cultural and social issues of our time: factory closings and the loss of jobs, the need for affordable housing, adolescents coming of age in an inner-city high school. His first book, Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory (DoubleTake/Norton, 1998), won the Mayflower Prize in Non-Fiction and was a semi-finalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He has had one-person exhibitions at the Yale University Art Gallery, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, the North Carolina Museum of Art, The Nasher Museum of Art, and the National Building Museum. He was a Morehead-Cain Scholar at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and currently teaches at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies.
A trademark of Bamberger’s exhibitions is that they are first shown in the community where he has chosen to photograph, prior to the museum premier. His projects are long-term and highly collaborative. Many include the design and construction of custom-made galleries, sited in the very neighborhoods where he is photographing. At both the community and museum levels, he finds essential ways to include the people he has photographed in the production, design, and public programming surrounding his exhibitions.
