Meet Shaina Gates

We’re thrilled to announce that Shaina Gates is joining our 2025 artist residency cohort at Graylag! During her time at Graylag, she will offer a workshop on Lumen Printing. Space is limited, so be sure to register!

Shaina Gates is an artist working in experimental photography, sculpture, and material studies. For the last several years, she has developed the process of using black and white film to make colorful transparent images, using only the sun and limited chemistry. Through a series of system-based processes, she uses the responsiveness of film to explore light phenomena, geometry, time, and dimensional perception. The resulting range of colors and patterns that appear on the black and white film make it possible to visualize aspects of the world that are otherwise invisible to us.

Gates earned an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2016, an MAT in Art Education in 2008, and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2005. In 2023, her work was included in the Center for Maine Contemporary Art’s Biennial. A collection of her work on photographic film and paper was also included in the New England Triennial in 2022, presented by the deCordova Museum and Fruitlands Museum. She has produced several solo exhibitions, most recently including Specimina at the Experimental Photo Festival in Barcelona, Spain (summer 2024), and TESTSET at 3SArtspace in Portsmouth, NH (fall 2023). Her work has been shown in many group exhibitions around the country over the past 2 decades. In 2023, Gates was awarded a substantial Artist Advancement grant by the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, which recently concluded in an exhibition at 3SArtspace in the fall of 2024. Gates currently lives and works in Kittery, Maine.

Learn more about Shaina:

Website: ShainaGates.com
Instagram: instagram.com/shainagates