Authors

Work: I am a writer/photographer/filmmaker I’m Floyd Webb, a Chicago filmmaker, producer, and cultural organizer. I was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1953 and raised on Chicago’s South Side, where I began my career as a projectionist at Chicago Filmmakers. From there, I apprenticed at the Community Film Workshop, coming up alongside directors like Charles Burnett and Julie Dash. I went on to found the Blacklight International Film Festival in Chicago, a platform dedicated to Black independent cinema that ran for over four decades. In 2005, I co-founded Black World Cinema with Alisa Starks, continuing a commitment to creating space for films and filmmakers too often overlooked by mainstream institutions. My work has long been connected to Afrofuturism. I’ve described it as “imagination amplified to the point at which it impinges on reality”—a way of thinking about the future that is grounded in history, but not limited by it. Across my career, I’ve worked in photojournalism, publishing, and advertising, alongside my work in film. More recently, I’ve focused on building new platforms and conversations. Projects like Blacklight Festival RELOAD, presented as part of Chicago Filmmakers’ 50th anniversary, brought together discussions on volumetric cinema, VR/AR, AI, and Black video game development. These are not just emerging technologies, but new terrains for storytelling—ones that connect directly to ongoing work like the Edge of Bronzeville project. At every stage, my work has been about creating access, expanding possibility, and building spaces where our stories can be told on our own terms.

Photography and Digital Imaging Services

Artefakt Founder Jon Lowenstein has spent most of his career making long term, indepth documentary explorations that confront the realms of power, poverty and the diaspora. Through a combination of filmmaking, photography, experiential writing and personal testimonials he strives for unsparing clarity by revealing the subjects of history that lack a voice.

Yvette Marie Dostatni explores the lives of family, friends, neighbors, and strangers alike through her lens, revealing the common yet contradictory threads that weave humanity together. Her subjects range from personal memories of growing up in small towns throughout the Midwest to more complex matters, including her experiences living in Chicago. These visual narratives range from Ladies Bingo Night at the Whiting, Indiana, Moose Club, to a man smoking a wax paper cigarette inside his car, which doubled as his lifelong home on the infamous Maxwell Street in Chicago before the onslaught of mass gentrification. In 2000, Yvette was one of 12 full-time photographers participating in the acclaimed year-long documentary project CITY 2000 on Chicago. In 2011, she was one of fifty American artists invited to the Lishui Arts Festival in China. In 2016, Time Magazine nominated her as one of only 28 "Unsung Female Photographers of the Past Century." Yvette has received many international awards, including a two-time finalist and winner of the Julia Margaret Cameron Award (2010/2019/2023), a recipient of the Top-Two Hundred Photography nomination for Photolucida's Critical Mass (2018), and a two-time recipient of a Top-Fifty Photographer nomination for Photolucida's Critical Mass (2007/2024). Her work is featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times Lens Blog, Russian Esquire, LENSCRATCH, LensCulture, AINT-BAD, The Paris Review, Photographer's Quarterly, National Geographic, Chicago Magazine, The Chicago Tribune Magazine, and The Chicago Reader. She has exhibited in group shows across the United States, including the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles, California, the Houston Center for Photography in Houston, Texas, the Chicago Cultural Center in Chicago, Illinois, the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, California, and the Griffin Museum in Winchester, Massachusetts. In September 2024, Laura Husar Garcia curated Yvette's solo exhibition, "Face Value: Identities Both Seen and Unseen," at The Riverside Arts Center in Riverside, Illinois.