In Conversation: Muscle Memory with Emilia Mickevicius, Claire Warden, Marcus Carmichel, and Mehrdad Mirzaie
Wednesday, May 13, 2026 | 6:30–7:30 pm
Great Hall South
TICKETS: Free RSVP
Join Emilia Mickevicius, Norton Family Assistant Curator of Photography, for an expansive conversation with regional artists Claire A. Warden, Marcus Carmichael, and Mehrdad Mirzaie.
Drawing from the themes of Muscle Memory: Lens on the Body, this panel will share how they utilize photography to document movement, strength, and vulnerability. Together, the group will discuss the camera’s unique ability to capture small gestures that speak to larger stories of identity, migration, and the lived experience of the body over time.
Artist Bios
Claire A. Warden (b. Montréal, Québec) is an interdisciplinary artist working in still and moving image media. Her work challenges representation, portraiture, racialized experience in the United States through abstraction and experimental image-making. A recipient of the New Artist Society award from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Warden has been named one of LensCulture’s Top 50 Emerging Talents and a Photo Boite 30 Under 30 Women Photographer. Her work is featured in Harper’s Magazine and Light Work’s Contact Sheet, and she has completed residencies at the Center for Photography at Woodstock and the Penumbra Foundation.
Marcus Xavier Chormicle is a 2025 United States Latinx Artist Fellow and an MFA candidate at the University of Arizona. In 2021, he founded the Cristian Anthony Vallejo Memorial Gallery in Las Cruces, New Mexico, a space dedicated to Indigenous and Latinx artists and the exploration of generational cycles, migration, and spirituality. A graduate of the Walter Cronkite School at ASU, Chormicle’s practice focuses on artistic reflections of daily life and Indigenous ways of expressing place. He recently held his first museum solo exhibition at the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at the University of Texas at El Paso.
Mehrdad Mirzaie is an Iranian interdisciplinary artist, assistant curator, and educator whose practice centers on the politics of memory and historical erasure. Working with photography and alternative image-making processes, he explores how visual histories are preserved, reinterpreted, or lost in regions marked by censorship and state violence. Mirzaie is the founder of the Tasvir Archive Project, a research initiative dedicated to Iranian photographic practices. He holds an MFA from Arizona State University and is currently pursuing an MA in Art History, focusing on the global context of image-based art from Iran.