SASHA ARUTYUNOVA AND GREGORY HARRIS

In conjunction with the 2026 Filter Photo Festival, Filter Photo is pleased to present a conversation between Filter Space exhibiting artist, Sasha Arutyunova, and the Photography Curator at The High Museum of Art, Gregory Harris. They will discuss Sasha's ongoing body of work, Wind and Other Dangers, currently on view at Filter Space. The series documents her family across Russia, Armenia, and the United States, exploring migration, memory, and the shape of familial ties through time.

Sasha Arutyunova (Moscow, 1988) is a Brooklyn-based photographer and director whose work is grounded in sensitive storytelling. Characterized by atmospheric visual language, her photographs strive to elevate the everyday, draw out connections between people and their natural environment, and convey nuanced perspectives of complex relationships.

Central to her practice is a long-term project photographing her family, scattered across Russia, Armenia, and the United States. Through sensitive portraits and poignant details, she seeks to understand and document their evolving immigrant stories as well as the dissimilar cultural contexts in which their lives take place. Her book Shelter, documenting the 2020 pandemic lockdown in New York City, was published by TIS books in 2021 and is included in the Museum of Modern Art Library. Her recent series, Finibusterrae, examines the lifecycle of olive trees in southern Italy amid ecological crisis.

Arutyunova’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, National Geographic, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and TIME, among other publications, and has been exhibited internationally. She has received numerous distinctions, including Photo District News magazine’s “30 New and Emerging Photographers to Watch,” and has been recognized by the Aperture Foundation and the Lucie Foundation. In 2026, she was named the recipient of the New York Botanical Garden Larry Lederman Photography Fellowship.

Gregory Harris is the Donald and Marilyn Keough Family Curator of Photography at High Museum of Art in Atlanta. He is a specialist in contemporary photography with a particular interest in documentary practice. Since joining the High in 2016, Harris has curated over two dozen exhibitions that consider an array of topics, including notions of truth in contemporary photography, the intersections of photography and self-taught art, and distinct history of photography in the American South. His recent publications include Mimi Plumb: Blazing Light (Radius Books, 2026), A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845 (Aperture, 2023), Evelyn Hofer: Eyes on the City (High Museum of Art and Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2023), and Walks to the Paradise Garden (Institute 193, 2018), and he has contributed essays to monographs by Mark Steinmetz, Amy Elkins, Matthew Brandt, and Paul D'Amato. Harris was previously the Assistant Curator at the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago and also held curatorial positions at the Art Institute of Chicago. He earned a BFA in photography from Columbia College Chicago and an MA in art history from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.