Please join us for an evening of art and conversation as Melissa Ann Pinney and Dawn Turner discuss their work alongside current and former CPS students, T’Shareah Willingham and Jake Whalen. This is the culmination of Melissa’s project for the Diane Dammeyer Fellowship in Photographic Arts and Social Issues.

Melissa Ann Pinney, a Guggenheim Fellow whose works are in museum collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute and many others, has photographed in Chicago Public Schools since 2018. These images bear witness to students freely defining themselves amid all the issues of our day and reveal the beauty and significance of young lives we seldom see pictured. Pinney’s project envisions a reality in which children of all colors and genders are valued, their voices heard, their experience honored, their lives protected.

Dawn Turner is an award-winning author and journalist. Her most recent book, Three Girls from Bronzeville: A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood, was named a Notable book of 2021 by The New York Times and a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Buzzfeed, The Library Journal, among others. A former columnist for the Chicago Tribune, Dawn spent a decade and a half writing about race, politics and people whose stories are often dismissed and ignored. Dawn spent the 2014–2015 school year as a Nieman Journalism fellow at Harvard University. In 2018, she served as a fellow and journalist-in-residence at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. In 2018, she established the Dawn M. Turner and Kim D. Turner Endowed Scholarship in Media at her alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.