Amanda Cooper is a fifth-generation Floridian and native of St. Petersburg, and received a BA in Art History from the University of Florida in 1997. Since 1999, she has worked as Curator of Exhibitions (now Chief Curator) at the Morean Arts Center in St. Petersburg, organizing over 400 exhibitions, including works in all media by students, established and emerging artists, and children. She has also served as a juror for various art exhibitions including Dunedin Art Harvest, the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards exhibition, Gasparilla Festival of the Arts, FolkFest St. Pete, Melbourne Arts Festival, ArtFest Fort Myers, Ocala Arts Festival and the Pinellas Association of Visual Artists Cool Art Show. She has served on art panels for Pinellas County and the State of Florida, awarding several public art projects and individual artist grants, and has been a member of the steering committee for the SHINE Mural Festival since 2015. She lives in St. Pete with her husband, three children, and two cats.
Christopher Jones is the Stanton B. and Nancy W. Kaplan Curator of Photography and Media Arts at The Ringling Museum of Art and holds a faculty position at Florida State University. He has curated numerous photography and contemporary art exhibitions, including Territories: Photography, Space, and Power (2017); Hank Willis Thomas: Branded/Unbranded (2017); Approaching the Border (2018); Coco Fusco: Twilight (2018); Manuel Álvarez Bravo: Specters and Parables (2019); Metadata: Rethinking Photography in the 21st Century (2022); Working Conditions (2023); and Jess T. Dugan: I Want You to Know My Story (2024), among many others. Prior to his role at The Ringling, he served as Assistant Curator of Prints and Photographs at the University of New Mexico Art Museum. He earned his M.A. in Art History from the University of New Mexico and has taught numerous courses on art history, curatorial studies, and the history of photography.
Marieke van der Krabben, is a curator and photography historian. After receiving a BA in Art History and a MA in Film and Photographic Studies from Leiden University in the Netherlands, she worked as a junior curator at the Museum of Photography in The Hague. Additionally, she was the curator and creative director for the International Photo Festival Leiden for 3 years. Marieke has co-authored photography books and has written for art-related magazines. She was previously a curator at the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts in Tampa and is currently the executive director and co-founder of the Saint Petersburg Month of Photography.
Ric Savid the 2024 SPMOP Photo Laureate is a self-taught analog photographer who embraces existing light and darkroom printing. His work, dubbed environmental street portraiture, captures emotion intuitively, revealing his own character through the lens. He has taught darkroom photography at various art centers in the Tampa Bay area and to at-risk children for the Juvenile Welfare Board of Pinellas County, Florida. Savid’s work has appeared in American Photo, Aperture, Black and White, and Focus magazines. He has been awarded multiple grants. In 2007, two of his Philippine images won first and second prize in the Prix De La Photographie in Paris.
Lance Rothstein is a professional photojournalist, teacher and artist, living in Clearwater, Florida. He specializes in traditional film, Polaroid & darkroom photography and has been teaching the subject for more than 15 years. Lance was a staff Photojournalist at the Tampa Bay Times and the Tampa Tribune. His other clients include The New York Times, The Miami Herald, ABC News, and Sports Illustrated. After living and working with his wife in Belgium for six years, he now works and teaches throughout Tampa Bay.
Jason Lazarus is an artist exploring vision and visibility through an expanded photographic practice that includes original and appropriated images, text-as-image, photo-derived sculptures, live archives, and public submission projects. His work has been featured in Artforum, The New York Times, Frieze, The Guardian, and more, and exhibited at SF MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, MASS MoCA, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, among others. He has lectured at Yale, ICP, and the Art Institute of Chicago, and his work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum, SFMOMA, and the MCA Chicago. Lazarus is also Co-director of Coco Hunday in Tampa and an Associate Professor of Art at the University of South Florida.
