2025 Portfolio Prize winner, Alana Perino, discusses their award-winning series Pictures of Birds with writer, curator, and educator Ariel Goldberg.
Pictures of Birds constructs a mesmeric evocation of memory and mortality in Longboat Key, Florida, where Perino temporarily moved in 2020 to be with their father and stepmother, whose health was in decline. Here, family roles were rewritten as Perino and their sister became their parents’ caretakers, and the series reflects on the strange experience of living in “a home and a retirement community arranged to affirm health and security yet compromised by the ubiquity of illness and impermanence.”
This conversation originally took place on September 6, 2025.
Alana Perino (born in New York, 1988) is an artist based in Providence, Rhode Island. Their practice, which spans photography, sculpture, performance, and autofiction, is concerned with home, the nature of belonging, and perceptions of the self. Their work has been exhibited and published by Aperture, Lenscratch, LensCulture, and Palm Studios, among others. They are assistant professor at Johnson & Wales University, Providence.
Ariel Goldberg is a writer, curator, and educator devoted to trans and queer lineages and lesser-known histories of photography. Goldberg’s books include The Estrangement Principle (2016) and The Photographer (2015). They are a recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Book Grant and a Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellowship at the New York Public Library.
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