In 2024, high school students from South Shore College Prep, Lincoln Park High School, and Prosser Career Academy worked with artists Regina Agu, Jonathan Michael Castillo, and Dawit L. Petros to create photographic portraits and oral history records capturing visual and audio from family and community members about their stories of migratory relocation to Chicago.

Regina Agu was born in Houston, Texas and raised between the United States, Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, South Africa, and Switzerland. She relocated to Chicago in 2020, where she now lives and works.

Her work spans exhibitions, publications, performances, and public readings, presented internationally at venues such as the New Museum, The Drawing Center, the High Line, Project Row Houses, FotoFest, and the American University Museum. Recent exhibitions include the 2021 Atlanta Biennial: Of Care and Destruction and the 2021 Texas Biennial: A New Landscape, A Possible Horizon. Her first solo museum exhibition, Passage, was presented at the New Orleans Museum of Art (2019–2020).

Agu is the 2023 Joyce Award recipient with the Museum of Contemporary Photography. Her projects have been supported by Artadia, Houston Arts Alliance, The Idea Fund, and the University of Houston’s Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts + Project Row Houses Fellowship. She has held residencies at Hyde Park Art Center, Joan Mitchell Center, A Studio in the Woods, The Drawing Center, and Atlantic Center for the Arts, among others.

She holds a BS from Cornell University and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

In 2025, Agu’s launched Regina Agu: Shore | Lines at MoCP as her first Midwest solo exhibition and its companion publication Regina Agu: Field Notes for Shore Lines published by Kris Graves Projects

Jonathan Michael Castillo is a visual artist, photographer and educator based in Chicago. He was the 2019-2021 recipient of the Diane Dammeyer Fellowship in Photographic Arts and Social Issues. Jonathan was included in the 2021 Hyde Park Art Center’s Ground Floor Biennial in Chicago and was a finalist for the WMA Commission in Hong Kong. His work has been featured with The New Yorker, Wired, The Chicago Tribune, CBS: Los Angeles, and Brazil’s G1 Globo. He has been interviewed on the BBC’s “World Update” and Los Angeles public radio stations KPCC and KCRW. Jonathan was recently commissioned to create a large-scale permanent installation of his work at O’Hare International Airport as part of the Terminal 5 expansion project. In 2023 he was commissioned to make work for the city of Chicago’s Citywide Plan in partnership with the Department of Cultural Affairs and the Department of Planning and Development. Exhibitions include those at the Art Institute Chicago, Photo LA 2020, the Center for Creative Photography, Aperture Gallery, House of Lucie, Filter Photo Gallery, Ralph Arnold Gallery and the California Museum of Art Thousand Oaks. Jonathan is represented by Samuel Maenhoudt Gallery in Belgium. His education includes a BFA from California State University Long Beach and MFA from Columbia College Chicago.

Dawit L. Petros is a visual artist, researcher, and educator whose practice is informed by studies of global modernisms, diaspora, and postcolonial theory. An Eritrean emigrant who spent formative years in Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Kenya before settling in Canada, Petros draws on lived experiences of migration to critically examine the entanglements between colonialism and modernity. His installations combine photography, moving image, sculpture, and sound, employing painterly, performative, and site-responsive strategies that echo the extensive travels integral to his work.

He holds an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Tufts University, a BFA from Concordia University, a BA in History from the University of Saskatchewan, and completed the Whitney Independent Study Program. Petros’s work has been shown internationally at venues including the Studio Museum in Harlem, Huis Marseille Museum of Photography (Amsterdam), the 13th Biennial of Havana, the National Museum of African Art (Washington, DC), the Durban Art Gallery, and the Lianzhou International Photo Festival.

His awards include the Terra Foundation Research Fellowship, the Paul De Hueck and Norman Walford Career Achievement Award in Art Photography, and the Duke and Duchess of York Prize in Photography. Petros is represented by Tiwani Contemporary (London) and Bradley Ertaskiran (Montreal).

In 2024, Petros premiered his solo exhibition at MoCP and publication by Mousse Publishing, Dawit L. Petros: Prospetto a Mare curated by MoCP Chief Curator and Deputy Director Karen Irvine.