Announcing our 2026 NYSCA Support for Artists Recipients
Photo by Zumrad Mirzalieva
Magnum Foundation is delighted to receive the New York State Council on the Arts’ Support for Artists grants for the third year running! These grants have been awarded to Laila Stevens, Ariel Goldberg, and Zumrad Mirzalieva for their new and ongoing projects.
Find more on the grantees and their projects below.
Photo by Amber N. Ford
Laila Stevens’ editorial work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian US, The Nation, The Gothamist, Cultured Magazine, and other world-renowned platforms. She is the 2025 PhotoVogue Emerging Voices Grants Recipient for the "Women by Women" Open Call, 2025–2026 Curve Foundation Fellow for Emerging Journalists, Fall 2025 Artist-in-Residence at Yaddo, 2023 Magnum Foundation New York City Fellow, and a graduate of the Eddie Adams Workshop Class of XXXIV. Her photographs were featured in the 2025 release of Reflections in Black: A Reframing, the 25th anniversary edition of Dr. Deborah Willis’ internationally acclaimed publication. Stevens has also exhibited in the U.S. and internationally and presented artist talks and lectures at The Center for Book Arts, The Fashion Institute of Technology, and Photoville’s Educator Lab.
With the NYSCA Support for Artists grant, Stevens will be developing In Their Image — a collaborative-community photographic project that brings queer and trans youth across New York City into visual and conceptual conversation with queer figures from the past. Rooted in portraiture and historical research, the work pairs contemporary images with archival references to explore lineage, influence, and the ways queer history is carried forward by situating participants in comparison. The culminating public installation and gathering function as both offering and archive— creating space for collective reflection, ritual, and visibility while honoring the intergenerational conversation on queer historic knowledge.
Courtesy of The New York Public Library
Ariel Goldberg’s publications include The Estrangement Principle (Nightboat Books, 2016) and The Photographer (Roof Books, 2015). Their exhibition on photography’s relationship to spaces for learning, Images on which to build, 1970s-1990s was on view at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati as part of the 2022 FotoFocus Biennial, The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in NYC, and the Chicago Cultural Center from 2022-2024. As part of the exhibition, Goldberg partnered with Magnum Foundation for series of conversations with Diana Solís and Morgan Gwenwald. Goldberg is also a 2024 Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellow at the New York Public Library, 2020 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Book Grant to support their work in progress Seeking Captions. Goldberg regularly contributes to leading artist monographs on trans and queer photography, such as Lyle Ashton Harris (Queens Museum & Rose Art Museum with Gregory R. Miller & Co, 2024), Carmen Winant (Printed Matter, 2020), Paul Mpagi Sepuya (Aperture & Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 2019). Their writing has also appeared in Lucid Knowledge: On the Currency of the Photographic Image, Afterimage Journal, e-flux, and Jewish Currents.
With the NYSCA Support for Artists grant, Goldberg will be continuing their ongoing book project, Seeking Captions. “While greater visibility de-stigmatized queerness in the late 20th century, this win was possible because of risk-taking, community building, media production in and outside mainstream channels, and the ethics of producing catalyzing images of an ongoing social movement. Trans and queer photo history has largely been told through sensational accounts of dead figures, individual “pioneers,” and major institutional group shows that sing a top-40 tune. Seeking Captions argues trans and queer photographic histories deserve a book about how collective organizing is our greatest source of power. This is a photo history book that rejects the notion of the western canon in favor of a handbook to fight the threats we face. Photography was an ingredient to get people together, do political education, learn about power, change their lives, and fight for true liberation (not assimilation!)”
Photo by Joe Habben/ Fabrica Research Center
Zumrad Mirzalieva is a visual artist, researcher and cultural programmer working with photography and moving image. Her research explores themes of agency, solidarity, ecology and extraction. She is the Program and Development Director of the Davra Research Collective, a recent resident at Fabrica Research Centre, Delfina Foundation and a Magnum Foundation Photography Exanded: Heat Fellow. She holds a Master’s degree in Social Innovation from the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she focused on exploring the transformative potential of art in driving positive social change.
With the NYSCA Support for Artists grant, Mirzalieva will be expanding her project Brightonli — a short film exploring how members of the Uzbek diaspora in New York recreate familiar environments in a new, foreign context. It is set in and around Brighton Beach and Sheepshead Bay, where many Central Asian migrants have settled over the past decade. The film attempts to capture how fragments of home are carried and reimagined though spatial and labour practices.
“The project started from an interest in male-only spaces in Uzbekistan, like barbershops, teahouses, mosques, and builds on my earlier series Sartaroshxona. But since then, I realized the need to move beyond that binary. This film rather looks at the emotional architecture of migration. How can we recreate intimacy, kinship and familiarity in unfamiliar places? I’m interested in the way labor, caregiving and gender dynamics travel and manifest spatially (physically) and emotionally in New York.”