Event Info

Join us for a conversation between artist Sofia Valiente and independent curator and writer Nora Khan to discuss Valiente’s film, Ivy Ridge, on view now at UCR ARTS. They will be joined by film collaborators Valerie Roman and Kia Thomas.

Ivy Ridge is an experimental documentary film created by Sofia Valiente that uses collaboration and memory to create a psychological depiction of life inside therapeutic boarding schools. In an act of resistance, four former students from the Academy at Ivy Ridge return to the defunct facility in upstate NY to retroactively tell their stories. The abandoned building contained personal files which were used in the recounting of the events that occurred.

Sofia Valiente received her BFA in Art from Florida International University in Miami in 2012 and she is currently a graduate student in Visual Arts at the University of California, Riverside 2024. Valiente is an award-winning photographer and interdisciplinary artist with two published books “Miracle Village” (2014) and “Foreverglades” (2019). In 2015, she received the World Press Photo award for Miracle Village (1st prize, portraits, stories) and she is also a two-time recipient of the South Florida Cultural Consortium Artist Fellowship. In 2017, Sofia won the Knight Arts Challenge Grant for Foreverglades and in 2018 she received a State of Florida Individual Artist grant. Sofia’s work has been published in Time, the Guardian, Smithsonian, Vice, American Photo Magazine, and many other media outlets. She is represented by Daniel Blau Gallery in Munich, Germany and her projects have been exhibited internationally with solo shows in London, Paris, Munich and NYC and in numerous other group shows in museums and photography festivals around the world. To learn more about Sofia’s work, you can visit her website at www.sofiavaliente.com or follow her on Instagram at @valiente_sofia

Nora N. Khan is a curator, editor, and writer of criticism on digital visual culture and theory of emerging technologies. She is the Co-Curator of the Biennale de L’Image en Mouvement 2024, A Cosmic Movie Camera, with Andrea Bellini, hosted by Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève. Her books are Seeing, Naming, Knowing (Brooklyn Rail) and with Steven Warwick, Fear Indexing the X-Files (Primary Information). Forthcoming are AI Art and the Stakes for Art Criticism (Lund Humphries) and Kingdom (Primary Information). She has served as editor at Rhizome, Topical Cream, and HOLO, and as professor in Digital + Media at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she was nominated for the John R. Frazier Award for Excellence in Teaching. Her writing has been honored by a Critical Writing Grant given through the Visual Arts Foundation and the Crossed Purposes Foundation and a Thoma Foundation Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, and supported by residencies at La Becque and Eyebeam.

Programs at UCR ARTS are supported by the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at UCR, and by the City of Riverside.