Photo © Leysis Quesada Vera | Jíbaro Photos

Leysis Quesada Vera

Founding Member
born: Cuba
based: Cuba
Website | @leysisquesadavera

Biography

Leysis Quesada Vera was born in Cienfuegos in 1973 and started her career as an English teacher in a junior high school in Havana. Her first photographic inspiration came from her cousin Lázaro Miranda and in the form of a meeting with photographer Jon Golden, who was visiting Havana with Maine Media Workshops in 1999 and gifted her his Nikon FM2 camera. This was her only camera with which she made her first important photographs in Cuba. By 2001, Leysis had worked alongside David Alan Harvey and Stacey Boge, both of whom she considers her early mentors.

Leysis focuses a large part of her work on women and their ways of confronting dissimilar realities that correspond to them — simply because they are women. She prefers to work indoors to shape light as a representation of the hopes and dreams surreptitiously found in every person. She equates photographing everyday life and the overall reality of Cuba to reliving moments from her childhood, and along with them deeply entrenched conflicts, moments of loneliness, and stereotypical stigmas that women continue to face in the 21st century.

Today, Leysis has turned most of her work inwards with the birth of her two daughters Avril and Mia, her central motivations to make images. It is her own family, friends, and her neighborhood that her photography centers around. Out of this focus has emerged a pivotal body of work on Cuban ballerinas.

Leysis was commissioned by the Annenberg Space for Photography alongside Raúl Cañibano, Elliot Erwitt, and Michael Christopher Brown for the series “Cuba Is” in 2017. She has been exhibited in over a dozen internationally reputed shows and was nominated by the Magnum Foundation to the Emergency Funds Grants 2016.

Gallery