Emma Ressel (b. Bar Harbor, ME) is an artist working with large format film photography to make still life images with natural history collections. Her images aim to complicate the boundaries between dead versus alive, nature versus artifice, and beauty versus the grotesque. She is currently collaborating with biologists to problematize ideas around animal preservation and explore how science processes and institutions reveal our desire for proximity with nature.
Ressel earned her BA in Photography at Bard College and is currently an MFA candidate in Photography at the University of New Mexico. She has completed residencies at Lugoland in Lugo, Italy and at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City. She has been awarded the 2022 Film Photo Student Project Award, 13th Still Life Pollux Award, Magenta Foundation Flash Forward 2019, and the Stinnett Philadelphia Museum of Art Collection Award. She currently holds a fellowship at the Center for Regional Studies at UNM and was a 2023-2024 Emerging Artist Member at Strata Gallery in Santa Fe, NM.
Ressel’s first photobook, “Olives in the street,” was published by Edizione del bradipo in 2017. She has contributed photography to publications including “The New Yorker,” “Refinery 29,” and “Philadelphia Magazine,” amongst others. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Ressel currently lives in Albuquerque, NM, where – in addition to working toward her MFA – she teaches photography at The University of New Mexico. In the 2025-2026 academic year, she will conduct a Post-Doc Fellowship at the Center for Regional Studies at UNM. Ressel was a recipient of the Film Photo Student Project Award and held an Emerging Artist Fellowship at Strata Gallery in Santa Fe, NM, where she had a solo show in May 2024. The catalog for her MFA thesis show, “Extant Erosions,” was self-published this year, and the exhibition is on view in Albuquerque through June 2025.
With regards to her being awarded a Post-Doc Fellowship at UNM, she states, “I am thrilled to have been selected for a Post-Doc Fellowship through the Center for Regional Studies, and I look forward to my year conducting interdisciplinary research into museum archives, slides, and natural history in New Mexico. Throughout my time in the MFA program at UNM I worked with collections at multiple science museums in Albuquerque and refined my modes of artistic research. As a post-doc fellow, I will expand and deepen this research. I look forward to sharing how my work can highlight and critically engage with museums and collections in New Mexico.”
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
1) Learn more about Emma on her website: https://www.emmaressel.com/about
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