Date of bio, November 29, 2011
KAREN MIRZOYAN (b. 1981), grew up in Tbilisi, Georgia and now lives in Armenia. In 2005, he worked at Panos Pictures and at The Independent in London. Primarily, his work is concerned with the culture and post-conflict societies of countries in the Caucuses. In 2010, he won Magnum Foundation’s Caucuses Award and a scholarship to the NYU/Magnum Human Rights Program.
“Rock the Casbah - Basement Bands in Tehran,” will be the first solo exhibition in the US of Karen’s Tehran work.
________________________________________________________________________ Date of bio, September 23, 2011
KRISANNE JOHNSON (b. 1976), grew up in Xenia, Ohio. She graduated with a degree in journalism from the University of Colorado and pursued postgraduate work in visual communications at Ohio University.

Since 2006, Krisanne has been working on long-term personal projects about young women and H.I.V./AIDS in Swaziland, and post-apartheid South African youth culture. Her work has been recognized by World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year International, and the Best of Photojournalism. She has received the Getty Images Grant for Editorial Photography, a W. Eugene Smith Fellowship, and support from the Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund. Her work has appeared in various magazines and newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Fader, US News & World Report, Vanity Fair (Italy), and Newsweek (Japan). In 2010, POLKA Galerie in Paris exhibited her South African youth culture work as part of their group exhibit on past and current South African documentary photography. “I Love You Real Fast,” will be the first solo exhibition in New York of Johnson’s Swaziland work.
________________________________________________________________________ Date of bio, July 28, 2011
TAMAS DEZSO was born in 1978 in Budapest, Hungary, where he has lived all his life. He went to Budapest University of Technology to study engineering and quickly realized it wasn’t for him, so switched to taking pictures in 2001. The recipient of many awards, his most recent is First Place in the Project Competition category of the 2011 Center Awards. “The Dignity of Isolation,” will be the first solo exhibition in New York of Dezso’s Romania work.
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Date of bio June, 2011
JEHAD NGA was born in Smith Center, Kansas in 1976 and raised in Tripoli, Libya and London, England. His interest in photography began in 2001 while he was studying literature in Los Angeles, and led him to cover social issues in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

In 2002 Jehad went to New York City to become an Emergency Medical Technician while interning at Magnum Photos. When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, he traveled to Iraq for The New York Times to document it. In the fall of that year he went on to Liberia to cover the country’s civil war.

Jehad’s work was admitted into Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts permanent photo collection in 2008. He is represented by the M+B Photo Gallery in Los Angeles and Bonni Benrubi Gallery in New York.

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Date of bio April, 2011
ANDREW McCONNELL was born in Ireland in 1977 and began his career as a press photographer covering the closing stages of the conflict in his homeland and the transition to peace. He later worked in Asia, and in 2007 moved to Africa to document the issues and stories from that continent that are widely overlooked by the international media. “Ghosts of the Sahara” at The Half King will be the first showing of McConnell’s Sahrawi work.

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Date of bio: February, 2011
GINA LEVAY, based in New York City, shoots editorial, commercial, and independent work. “The Sandhog Project” was exhibited at Grand Central Terminal and is now a book entitled SANDHOGS (Powerhouse, Fall 2009). Currently she is shooting a photo and video project about young military widows across the US.

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Date of bio: December, 2010
CAROLYN DRAKE, based in Istanbul, Turkey, is an American photographer best known for her unique body of work examining the history, topography, cultures, and geopolitical borders of Central Asia, a region where East meets West, and cultures have intersected and collided for millennia.

Drake is the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship, the Lange Taylor Documentary Prize, and a Guggenheim fellowship, as well as awards from the POYi and World Press Photo competitions. Her work is published in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, National Geographic, The New York Times, and Newsweek. Recent exhibitions include solos shows at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, UK and The Third Floor Gallery in Cardiff, Wales.

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Date of bio: November, 2010
JAN BANNING was born in The Netherlands in 1954 of Dutch-East-Indies parents. He studied social and economic history at the University of Nijmegen. He has been working as a photographer since 1981.

Banning’s work, rooted in both art and journalism, has been exhibited and published widely in books, magazines and newspapers. The central themes in his work are state power, war, and government bureaucracy. Currently he is working on a portrait series of World War II “comfort women” in Indonesia.

Aside from Dutch, Banning is fluent in English, German and Spanish, speaks French reasonably well, and speaks some Portuguese and Indonesian.

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Date of bio: August, 2010
JEAN CHRISTOPHE was born in France in 1974 to a French father and an American mother of Lithuanian origin, and has been a part-time New Yorker since the age of eight. In 1998, he completed an MFA from Prague’s film academy of performing arts (FAMU). After working as an art director for Ogilvy and Mather in Budapest, he moved to Italy, where he directed short films to support social campaigns for Fabrica, Benetton’s communications research center. This led to a collaboration with Colors Magazine, where Christophe created photographic essays and wrote articles covering social themes—first in Eastern Europe, then in New York City.

Whilst in New York, Christophe joined Journeyman Pictures in 2001 to work on the film “Maria Full of Grace.” He continued as an editor for Journeyman and also Artist Public Domain until 2005. In 2006 he turned his attention back to documentary photography and began a long-term project about transitional states in the Eastern Bloc. His work in Kosovo in 2007 and Abkhazia in 2008 was supported by UNICEF. Out of his latest body of work “Internal Displacement,” he created an animated short in collaboration with contemporary artist Hans Op de Beeck, who wrote an original score for it.