MEET PAUL MPAGI SEPUYA
“I want to listen, and to provide some tools for navigating the life and career of an artist.”
Location: Los Angeles, California
Disciplines: Photography, Zines/book arts
Paul Mpagi Sepuya (b. 1982, San Bernardino, CA) is a Los Angeles-based artist working in photography. He received an MFA in photography at UCLA in 2016 and a BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2004. He went on to participate in Artist-in-Residence programs with LMCC, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, The Studio Museum in Harlem and FIAR, and was a recipient of the 2019 Rauschenberg Residency.
Sepuya’s work is in the permanent collections museums like the Getty and LACMA, SFMOMA, MoMA, the Whitney and thee Guggenheim, the Studio Museum, Stedelijk Museum, Tate Modern and Victoria & Albert Museum, and among others. Solo museum exhibitions include Fotomuseum Amsterdam, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Deichtorhallen PHOXXI in Hamburg, and museum surveys at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis at the Nottingham Contemporary.
Sepuya’s recent hybrid monograph-artist book “Dark Room A - Z” was published by Aperture in the Fall of 2024. His work has been covered and published in ARTFORUM, Aperture, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Art Review, Frieze, Art in America, Monocle, Osmos, The Nation, and The Guardian among others. He is Associate Professor in Visual Arts at the University of California San Diego and has taught at CalArts and Bard MFA.
Work
mentor profile
What interests you about mentoring?
“I am interested in mentoring because I enjoy and value generosity and dialogue.”
Given your experience and interests, what kind of emerging artist do you feel best positioned to support?
“I would be best able to support an artist who has a sense of who they are and where they want to be, even if the language isn't quite there, or the concept resolved. It's about determination, risk taking and vision. Someone who's willing to push themself out of the comfort zone and grow in unexpected ways.”
As a mentor, what would you like to offer an emerging artist? What would you like to receive?
“I'd like to offer honest and generous feedback, guidance and perspective based on my experiences and what my mentors have offered so generously to me. I want to listen, and to provide some tools for navigating the life and career of an artist.”
Have you had mentors of your own? Who have they been?
“My mentors extend back to my undergraduate professors at NYU, especially Lorie Novak, and then in my years between undergrad and grad school AA Bronson, Jack Pierson, Vince Aletti, Monica Majoli and Lyle Ashton Harris and Zoe Leonard each made impacts. Cathy Opie was my advisor in grad school, and Jim Welling, the late Silke Otto-Knapp, Andrea Fraser, Rodney McMillian and others really guided me. Now as a professor, I have as mentors fellow departmental faculty at UCSD and former teachers listed above who are now friends.”
This Mentor is open to working with Fellows either remotely or in-person! All meetings will be virtual with Paul.