Leslie Starobin

Leslie Starobin is a photographic artist and Professor Emerita of Art at Framingham State University in Framingham, MA. Her photographs, photo-narratives, and still-life montages are inspired by people and places steeped in family history, enriched by cultural traditions, and central to world history and the environment. One of her ongoing projects, "Looming in the Shadows of Łódź," weaves together film, oral history, and a visual travelogue of photo-narratives to tell the story of her ancestors' deportation to the Łódź ghetto. Her other ongoing project, "Out on a Limb: A Human is a Tree of the Field," seeks to protect endangered landscapes and trace the history of human migration by depicting close-up images of the organic contours and curves of both indigenous and non-native tree trunks across America, Israel, Spain, and England.

Starobin's artwork is in the permanent collection of many American museums, including the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Jewish Museum, NY, NY; Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Modern Art, NY, NY; and many others. Throughout her career, she has received numerous awards and grants, including a 2023 Combined Jewish Philanthropies Arts & Culture Community Grant Fund to support her project, “Looming in the Shadows of Łódź," about which she will be publishing a book, Looming in the Shadows of the Holocaust: A Memorial Book from Łódź, with George F. Thompson Publishing in 2027.

While at UVA as the inaugural Distinguished Artist in Residence, Starobin hopes to further her research for an upcoming anthology on the historic symbolism of trees in Judaism juxtaposed with the "treescapes" she has photographed in Tel Aviv and the surrounding regions as part of her "Out on a Limb" collection. She also plans to lead a one-credit workshop for students, entitled "Picturing Personal Pasts: Objects of Meaning and Memory." In this workshop, students will be introduced to literary and visual artists, along with historians and scholars, who are intrigued by objects that personify history and family legacies. They will explore various approaches to researching, writing, and reflecting on objects of memory, and will produce their own artwork, literary or scholarly projects which will be presented or displayed at the end of the course.