KATHY RYAN BIO

The longtime director of photography at The New York Times Magazine, Kathy Ryan has been a pioneer of combining fine art photography with photojournalism. She has worked with the world's best photographers across all genres of photography. She regularly brought new talent into The Magazine's pages. She left The Times after 39 years to focus on her own artwork, curating exhibitions, teaching a course at Yale, and speaking engagements. 

In 2011, Ryan edited The New York Times Magazine Photographs, a landmark book published by Aperture. An accompanying exhibition, curated by Ryan and Lesley Martin opened at the Rencontres d’Arles in 2012, traveled to FOAM Museum in Amsterdam, Palau Robert in Barcelona, Universidad Catolica in Santiago and ended its run at the Aperture Gallery in New York City. 

Office Romance, a book of Ryan’s photographs featuring her colleagues and the beauty and poetry to be found in the radiant light in the New York Times building was published by Aperture in 2014. This work has been exhibited in Europe and the U.S. All of Ryan’s photography is done with the iPhone.

Ryan has contributed essays and Q&A’s to books by photographers Lee Friedlander, Christopher Payne, Seydou Keïta, Paolo Pellegrin, Lynsey Addario, Jack Davison and Brian Finke. She was the picture editor of Feeling the Spirit by Chester Higgins.

The Magazine's photography and videos have been recognized with numerous awards. Ryan was awarded the Dr. Erich Salomon Prize from the German Photographic Society in September 2025. Ryan was a recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the Griffin Museum of Photography in 2007; the Royal Photographic Society’s annual award for Outstanding Service to Photography in 2012; the Vision Award at the Center for Photography at Woodstock in 2014; and the Outstanding Contribution to Photography recognition from Creative Review in 2016. Ryan has been recognized as Photo Editor of the Year by the Lucie Awards and Visa Pour l’Image. Ryan won two Emmy’s for videos she produced for The New York Times Magazine’s Great Performers series. Kathy was the International Center of Photography’s Spotlight honoree in 2024.

Photo credit: Inez & Vinoodh

Sarah Meister is executive director. She joined Aperture in May 2021, following more than twenty-five years at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. While leading efforts to move Aperture to a permanent home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan (anticipated late 2025), Sarah has encouraged renewed attention to Aperture’s storied backlist, including a new edition of Robert Frank’s The Americans (2024). As a curator, Sarah’s exhibitions include Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter (2025); Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography, 1946–1964 (2021); Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures (2020); From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola (cocurator, 2015); and Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light (2013). Her publications also consider Luigi Ghirri (2020), Gordon Parks (2020), Frances Benjamin Johnston (2019), Dorothea Lange (2018), New Documents, the 1967 MoMA exhibition (2017), Josef Albers (2016), and the three-volume series Photography at MoMA (with Quentin Bajac et al., 2015, 2016, 2017), among others. She is the founder and host of the Aperture PhotoBook Club, was lead instructor for Seeing Through Photographs (Coursera), and codirected the August Sander Project (MoMA/Columbia University). Sarah holds a BA in art history from Princeton University, New Jersey.

Sehin is an Ethiopian photographer and gallerist based in Addis Ababa. Working across street, documentary, and portrait photography, her practice is rooted in observation, natural light, and everyday life, with a focus on people, place, and the overlooked moments that shape everyday experience.

She began photographing as a teenager and has developed her practice over the past decade, documenting life in Ethiopia and beyond. Her work has been exhibited locally and internationally, including at Addis Foto Fest and exhibitions in Germany.

In 2024, Sehin was selected as the winner of the Women Street Photographers NYC Artist Residency, and completed the residency in 2025. Her solo residency work was exhibited in New York as part of the annual Women Street Photographers Festival. Later she developed Addis Eyes in New York, a body of work exploring the city through the perspective of an Ethiopian photographer.

She is also the co-founder of Artawi Gallery, Ethiopia’s first photography-focused artist-run spaces, founded in Addis Ababa in 2023. Established to create greater visibility and opportunities for photography in Ethiopia, Artawi has become an important platform for photographers and contemporary artists, presenting exhibitions and fostering a growing community around photography.

Gulnara Lyabib Samoilova is a Tatar born American photographer with over 45 years of experience in documentary, street, and fine art photography. She graduated from the International Center of Photography in 1994 and worked as a staff photo editor and photojournalist at the Associated Press.

Throughout her career, Gulnara has received numerous awards for her work, including a first prize from World Press Photo. Her photographs are held in the collections of the Museum of the City of New York, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the New York Historical Society.

She is the founder of Women Street Photographers, a global online and in person community, an artist residency, and a photo festival in New York City. She is the author of the best selling book Women Street Photographers (Prestel, 2021) and a portfolio book published by Peanut Press in 2023. Gulnara has organized and curated more than 30 exhibitions across four continents, including the annual Women Street Photographers Festival in New York City.

The festival, sponsored by Leica Camera, features group and solo exhibitions, grants, talks, panel discussions, and photo walks. In addition to her curatorial work, Gulnara is an inspirational speaker, guest judge for LensCulture, the Lucie Photo Book Prize, and UNESCO, a portfolio reviewer for Les Rencontres d’Arles and PhotoNOLA, and a Leica Oskar Barnack Award nominator.