In Conversation: Cristina E. Pardo Porto and Aldeide Delgado

What does it mean to think photography from underwater—and, more specifically, from a Caribbean ecology?

Join us for the first public presentation of Cristina E. Pardo Porto’s eight-month fellowship project, Seeing Blue: Photography’s Histories Underwater and Oceanic Caribbean Ecologies. Pardo Porto, 2026 WOPHA Research Fellow, will present her project, followed by a conversation and audience Q&A moderated by Aldeide Delgado, Founder and Director of WOPHA.

Approaching photography from an oceanic Caribbean perspective, Pardo Porto’s research foregrounds the conditions that shape vision underwater, including light, depth, and movement. Here, blue emerges not simply as a color but as a physical effect of wavelength absorption, shifting attention away from representation alone and toward the environmental and historical processes that determine what can be seen and remembered in images of the Caribbean.

Free and open to the public, the program welcomes students, artists, photographers, researchers, and anyone curious about photography, Caribbean histories, and new ways of thinking about images through the ocean.

Image Credits

Nadia Huggins, Transformations No.1, 2015

Andrea Chung, Anthropocene 3, 2014.

Celia Irina González, Ojos de Hueso, 2022.

About the WOPHA Research Fellowship program

The WOPHA Research Fellowship annually supports two emerging or established authors in producing scholarly essays on women and non-binary voices in photography. The program fosters innovative and diverse approaches from critical and historical to speculative and autobiographical. The 2025 fellows were selected through an open call juried by Raquel Villar-Pérez, an independent researcher and curator of photography.

The WOPHA Research Fellowship program is made possible through the support of the Pérez CreARTE Grant Program by The Jorge M. Pérez Family Foundation at The Miami Foundation and the Green Family Foundation. Cultural partners are The Betsy Hotel , Green Space Miami, and the Department of Art + Art History at Florida International University.

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This event is presented by Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA), in collaboration with the Department of Art + Art History at Florida International University.