“I stage complex still lifes of my maternal lineage using family archives, cut photographs, and religious and domestic rituals to examine my “cursed” maternal lineage. This work inhabits what writer Ingrid Rojas Contreras calls border grace—spaces between knowing and not knowing, suffering and understanding. The visual abundance in my work does not come from comfort or affection, but from the emotional residue of ritual, sacrifice, and generational endurance. To photograph is to pause within these accumulated narratives. A kind of bardo. A space between waking and remembering, between a strained phone call with a mother who wrestles with her vulnerability, between my grandmother’s truth and her memory.

“To think one is cursed is to think oneself above suffering. No one is above suffering.” This contradiction sits at the center of my work. I use photographic language not to break the curse or resolve it. To do so would be to place myself above my ancestors. But to ask: What does it mean to name the curse? To carry it differently? To exist within its truth?”

Sammie Correa is a photography and multimedia artist from the Washington, D.C. area. She integrates photography, sculpture, and intermedia to examine themes of her maternal lineage, curses, and spirituality.She is currently receiving her MFA in Photography at the University of Iowa and received her BFA degrees in Photography & Film and Arts Education from Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU).

“I stage complex still lifes of my maternal lineage using family archives, cut photographs, and religious and domestic rituals to examine my “cursed” maternal lineage. This work inhabits what writer Ingrid Rojas Contreras calls border grace—spaces between knowing and not knowing, suffering and understanding. The visual abundance in my work does not come from comfort or affection, but from the emotional residue of ritual, sacrifice, and generational endurance. To photograph is to pause within these accumulated narratives. A kind of bardo. A space between waking and remembering, between a strained phone call with a mother who wrestles with her vulnerability, between my grandmother’s truth and her memory.

“To think one is cursed is to think oneself above suffering. No one is above suffering.” This contradiction sits at the center of my work. I use photographic language not to break the curse or resolve it. To do so would be to place myself above my ancestors. But to ask: What does it mean to name the curse? To carry it differently? To exist within its truth?”

Sammie Correa is a photography and multimedia artist from the Washington, D.C. area. She integrates photography, sculpture, and intermedia to examine themes of her maternal lineage, curses, and spirituality.She is currently receiving her MFA in Photography at the University of Iowa and received her BFA degrees in Photography & Film and Arts Education from Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU).