Deconstruct, Reconstruct: Exploring New Creative Paths with Your Photography
with Maura Allen
October 1 – 29, 2025
Course Description
As photographers, we invest time, resources, and plenty of creative brainpower into composing, making, and sharing our work. The focus of this new online workshop with photographer and mixed media artist Maura Allen is to explore and experiment with ways to leverage your photographic images for fresh, unexpected results.
Known for working in and across traditional genres of photography, painting, printmaking, and glass, Maura shares how she embraced the creative use of photography for 25+ years to create her signature style and award-winning work. Her goal—to inspire you to think differently and discover new avenues of storytelling and creative impact with your photography as a starting point.
The five-week online workshop starts with a look at Maura’s path as an artist and the creative ways she uses her photographic imagery, including a deep image bank focused on the American West. She focuses on key pivots, points of inspiration, and lessons learned for those looking to start projects, build a deeper body of work, and reach a broader following.
In each weekly session, Maura inspires you to explore and experiment with new ways to think about and use your image assets through hands-on assignments, guided instruction, and creative challenges, including silkscreen (serigraph) printing, monoprints, kiln glass, and more. “How-tos” for both hands-on printmaking (screen-printing, woodcuts, gelli plate prints) and layered digital creation are covered to ensure those with limited access to studio space can participate and learn.
All workshop assignments start with and build around your own images, including digital or film—no prior printmaking experience is needed. Maura provides input on the process of selecting starting images, building layers, and exploiting specific elements of different materials and processes to add interest and depth. Throughout, you are inspired to look at photography as a jumping off point for new ways of creating, thinking, and working.
Additional Information
WHO SHOULD ATTEND:
What You Should Know:
This workshop is open to all photographers. No prior printmaking experience is needed.
Special Notes:
Class will meet 9:30 – 11:30 am (Mountain Time) on Wednesdays starting October 1 and ending October 29 (five online group sessions). Enrollment is limited to 12 participants.
Zoom Video Conferencing software (available for no charge from Zoom.com) will be used to facilitate the class sessions. Further details will be emailed to registrants.
Santa Fe Workshops always aims to produce a high-quality experience for our online attendees. That said, variables including regional and local internet provider speeds, traffic on Zoom's servers, and your own computing hardware can contribute to a less than ideal streaming event. While we do our best to minimize the impact of these variables, they are outside the control of Santa Fe Workshops.
Policies:
View Withdrawal and Transfer Policies for online programs.
For the convenience of participants, recordings of each class session are posted privately for one month after the end of each session. Santa Fe Workshops takes the recordings down after one month to protect the intellectual property of our instructors.
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about
Maura Allen is a black-and-white photographer of 50+ years. She has long considered her photographic images as assets—as moments that can be deconstructed, reconstructed, layered, and leveraged to build and tell stories. The focus of her work for the past 30 years has been stories of the American West, both real and romanticized. She uses her photographs captured on location at rodeos, ranches, and other venues as a starting point for creating original work that crosses traditional art genres, including painting, printmaking, glass, and sculpture.
An award-winning photographer, Maura received recognition in seven Julia Margaret Cameron Award for Women Photographers categories in 2024, including Category Winner (Black & White/Series, Portrait, Alternative Process) and Honorable Mention (Women by Women, Black & White, Open and Storytelling). Recognized as the #1 U.S. mobile photographer (and 5th in the world) by One Eyeland, Maura’s photography pursuits span from digital to alternative, including a deep love of palladium/platinum printing and pinhole camera image capture.
Maura has shown and sold her work in top galleries, museums, and national art shows for the past 20 years. Her signature-style and use of strong silhouettes has made her a sought-after artist and speaker. This winter, Double D Ranch, the top western lifestyle brand, will feature her original work in its Holiday Collection line of women’s clothing.
A Northern California native, Maura earned her BA in Latin/Classical Studies at Stanford University, where exposure to Eadweard Muybridge’s groundbreaking stop-motion photography informed how she sees the world in graphic shapes and silhouette. Maura serves on the board of trustees of the Desert Caballeros Western Museum and on the board of Photolucida, the producer of Critical Mass. In Spring 2025, she served as a juror for the Leica Women’s Grant. When not on the road with her camera, Maura lives in Abiquiu, New Mexico.
Website: mauraallen.com
Instagram: @monumentalwest
