Carla Shapiro is a photographer and educator based in the Catskill Mountains of Upstate New York. Her work explores themes of loss, memory, womanhood, and aging, often using alternative processes such as platinum printing, wet-plate collodion, and pinhole and Holga cameras. She is an associate professor in the graduate department at Pratt Institute.
Shapiro has received numerous awards, including three NYFA Fellowships and grants from NYSCA and Arts Mid-Hudson. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, and the New York Public Library.
At MacDowell in 2001, Shapiro started a new project, photographing at night. During her 2025 residency, she worked on photographing people over the age of 90 who are thriving. The body of work is titled Living in Velvet. She used the darkroom in Nef Studio to develop the film and print the images. She also photographed landscapes in the area and printed the images in platinum and palladium.
