Dani Hughes
Dani F. Hughes is a photographic artist based in the Great Lakes region whose practice explores resilience through inherited knowledge, family folklore, and environmental change. She is currently an MFA candidate and photography lecturer at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Her ongoing project, Grafting Sites, is a photographic collaboration with her father that examines working-class labor, ecological knowledge, and the lasting physical and psychological impacts of injury and repair. After a workplace accident ended her father’s career in road construction, he returned to caring for his rural Michigan property while navigating disability, chronic pain, progressive skin cancer, and memory loss. Over the past four years, Hughes has photographed him during each visit home, documenting the parallels between his body and the property he tends. She follows the metaphor and material process of grafting: the joining of separate living tissue to grow as one. His skin graft scars, grafted apple trees, and repaired tools reveal shared cycles of wear and adaptation. Materially, she extends these ideas into handmade paper created from cotton fibers and invasive plants identified alongside him. The paper becomes a surface that evokes the texture of his skin and the invasive spread of cancer cells across his body, functioning as a site of grafting for the images.
The support of this award will allow her to continue exploring how working-class knowledge and intergenerational collaboration can be preserved and reimagined through film photography, contributing to her MFA qualifier exhibition in Spring 2027.
