STARR OCKENGA, photographer, writer, poet, lecturer, educator, is the author of nine books, including Earth on Her Hands: The American Woman in Her Garden, which won an American Horticultural Society Award, and Eden on Their Minds: American Gardeners with Bold Visions—in both she documented private, unsung gardeners across this country.
In Amaryllis, she chronicled a year in the cycle of a single species and explored its long history. (In her greenhouse she grew 400 amaryllises that winter!) All three garden books were published by Clarkson Potter/Publishers. She is the author of three children’s books (David R. Godine, Publisher and Houghton Mifflin Company) in which she featured antique toys from the Children’s Museum in Boston and the Indianapolis Children’s Museum. On Women and Friendship is a history of tokens of friendship exchanged between women in the 19th century (Stewart, Tabori & Chang).
As a recipient of a Massachusetts Artists Foundation Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, her photographs have been exhibited in galleries and museums, The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, across the United States and abroad; her work has appeared in numerous national publications, including Horticulture, Life, Esquire, Camera.
Ockenga holds an MFA in Fine Art Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in Poetry from Lesley University. She is a former Associate Professor at MIT and Director of the Creative Photography Laboratory—and recently worked with Curator Gary van Zante at the new MIT Museum in Kendall Square, Cambridge, particularly the Kurtz Gallery for Photography, to archive the Creative Photography Laboratory’s history and participate in the accompanying exhibition and book. Ockenga lives and works in New York City.
Cardinalis cardinalis / Northern Cardinal / Cardinalidae