Intended Audience
Maxine Payne is a photographer living and working in Arkansas, where her grandparents raised her. She received her M.F.A from the University of Iowa where she was also an Iowa Arts Fellow. Payne was selected a Fellow of the American Photography Institute at New York University, as well as a Fellow of the College Art Association.
Currently a professor in the Art Department at Hendrix College, she works to find ways to engage community in her work and speaks to the idea of place. Payne was awarded the 2013 National Museum of Women in the Arts, Arkansas Fellowship for her photographic work. Her collaboration with Alabama Chanin launched in spring 2014 and her book “Making Pictures: Three for a Dime,” was published by Dust-to-Digital in 2015. Currently, Payne shares the Margaret Berry Hutton Odyssey Professorship with author Tyrone Jaeger. Their collaborative project with Hendrix College students and alumni, called Audio Visual Arkansas, focuses on collecting digital stories about Arkansans and can be seen at AVARK.net. She has also collaborated with anthropologist Anne Goldberg, documenting the lives of rural women in Costa Rica, the U.S./Mexico border, Africa and Vietnam. In 2017, Payne collaborated with biologist Matthew Moran to document the environment and people of the “Big Woods” region in Arkansas. She has photographed hundreds of Arkansas historic bridges for the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department since 2004. She has continued her curatorial work with two historic photographic archives, the Massengill family photographs and the photographs of Ellie Lee Weems, both of which are included in The High Museum of Art’s 2023 exhibition and publication "Photography and the American South" since 1850. Her work can be seen at www.MaxinePayne.com.