Photography & Media Lab manager and artist Amber Shields has been honored with one of the 2018 PDN Photo Annual awards in the category of "Personal Work." The award was judged by a panel of 29 experts in the photography industry. Shields' entry, her series Visions of Johanne - The Aging Female Body, was also featured in the two-person Fall 2017 Visual Arts Center exhibition, Body is a Bridge, with riel sturchio. Shields’s series about her grandmother Johanne spans 15 years, documenting a phase of a woman’s life that is often invisible in Western culture. Johanne, who defied societal norms in her earlier years, wrestles with macular degeneration, breast cancer and, eventually, her own mortality.
Shields has also recently been awarded the second place prize in the CENTER Choice awards in the Editor's Choice category. Jurors included Lisa Hostetler, PhD, Curator-in-Charge at George Eastman Museum; Naomi Cass, Director, Centre for Contemporary Photography; Bridget Watson Payne, Senior Editor at Chronicle Books; and Keith Jenkins, Director of Visual Journalism at NPR.