Call Description

The John Chervinsky Emerging Photographer Scholarship seeks to recognize, encourage and reward photographers with the potential to create a body of work and sustain solo exhibitions. Awarded annually, the Scholarship provides recipients with a monetary award of $3,000, exhibition of their work at the Griffin Museum of Photography, and a volume from John’s personal library of photography books. The Scholarship seeks to provide a watershed moment in the professional lives of emerging photographers, providing them with the support and encouragement necessary to develop, articulate and grow their own vision for photography.

Eligibility Criteria

The scholarship is open to photographers who have produced individual works of photography and/or are in the process of producing bodies of work.

We are looking for candidates who are serious about photography, whose potential is emerging and whose photography will benefit from this scholarship. 

Candidates can be currently enrolled in a photography degree program if in their graduating year. There is no age limit. There are no residency requirements. There is no application fee.

Photographers without gallery representation who have not exhibited solo in a commercial gallery, academic gallery (except for thesis shows), galleries in organizations like the Griffin Museum, Houston Center for Photography, Center for Fine Art Photography etc. or a museum setting or have not received significant (over $3000) grant funding are eligible (coffee shop, community gallery, library, academic thesis exhibitions, etc. are eligible exhibition settings). Past awardees of the Chervinsky Scholarship, paid employees of the Griffin Museum or their immediate families, Griffin Museum board members and jurors’ immediate families and those immediate families of Griffin board members or jurors’ paid employees are not eligible.

This scholarship is not for well-established photographers. Well-established photographers are individuals in mid-photography-careers and are seen by the public and peers as distinguished in the field of photography and have many accomplishments as a photographer.  Of note, receiving a Fulbright Scholarship would disqualify a candidate from receiving this scholarship. Producing a published (by a publisher) photo book would disqualify a candidate from receiving this scholarship. Self publishing does not disqualify a candidate.

Submissions

Submissions may be made directly to Café. You will be asked for a brief biography and artistic cv (a single PDF that includes both bio and cv. In the PDF title include Chervinsky and last name and first name.); a statement of artistic purpose/intent; a statement on the work supplied, and flattened rgb jpgs (1200 pixels on the longest side) of your photographs (10 photographs total). Please submit your images in the order you wish them to appear. numbering from 1-10 will be helpful to the jurors so they can see your intention with the works. 

Do not supply links. Café will give the jurors the ability to go there to view. No other means of submission will be accepted. All missing criteria will disqualify the submission. Emails will not be accepted as a method of submissions. It is recommended that great thought and effort be put into the artistic purpose/intent statement (see sample supplied). Artistic Purpose is how you will use the scholarship and your plan. The statement is about your body of work's intent.

It is recommended that you prepare all the elements of the application in advance. Do not start the application if you do not have time to finish it. Wait until you have time to complete the application in one session.

About the Jurors -

Judith Donath is a writer, designer and artist whose work focuses on the co-evolution of technology and society. She has published numerous articles about social media, AI, ethics and anonymity, and is the author of The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online (MIT Press). As the former director of the MIT Media Lab’s Sociable Media Group, she and her students designed innovative interfaces for on-line communities; their art projects examining the future of identity, privacy and mediated life have been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide. Currently, she is a faculty fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center and is writing a book about technology, trust and deception.

Fern L. Nesson is a graduate of Harvard Law School. She received an M.A. in American History from Brandeis and an M.F.A in Photography from the Maine Media College. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She practiced law in Boston for twenty years and subsequently taught American History and Mathematics.

Nesson’s photographs have been shown internationally in solo exhibitions at the Politecnico University in Torino, Italy, Les Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, France, Ph21 Gallery in Budapest, Hungary and at The University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica. In the United States, Nesson has had solo exhibitions at the Griffin Museum of Photography, at MIT and Harvard, and at the Beacon Gallery in Boston, Massachusetts, the Pascal Gallery in Rockport, and Maine, and Through This Lens Gallery in Durham, NC. Additionally, her work has been selected for numerous juried exhibitions in the U.S., Barcelona, Rome and Budapest. Nesson’s photobooks, Signet of Eternity and WORD, won the 10th and the 12th Annual Photobooks Award from the Davis-Orton Gallery. Her photography can be found at www.fernlnesson.

Laura Zittrain is a curator, teacher and writer who studies science and spirituality, including the rituals and practices of those disciplines. She produces workshops, classes and exhibitions that concern technology, mysticism, and embodiment. Her work extends from archival research in the history of chatbots and AI, to organizing hackathons and creating immersive soundscapes of celestial and human bodies. She is partial to dystopian science fiction and Busby Berkeley numbers, and can often be spotted in a cowboy hat in Cambridge, MA where lives and works.

Scholarship Dates and Deadlines
Tuesday September 16, 2025: Application period opens. Jurors are Judith Donath, Fern Nesson and Laura Zittrain

October 31, 2025: Application period closes at 11:59 PM Mountain Time. We will announce the awardee by January 1, 2026

Application Requirements

See Application Requirements above

Eligibility Criteria

See Eligibility Criteria above