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Photo courtesy of All Street Gallery.

Curator Spotlight: Victoria Campa


For the Counter Collective founder, To curate is to be in a relationship with others, their ideas, and their artistry.

By Ailsa Petrie

5.17.2026


On a Saturday morning in late February, I made my way to the East Village for the final day of Counter Collective’s photography show, Seeing Desire. I arrived at All Street Gallery and found the artist’s talk already underway, moderated by curator and collective founder, Victoria Campa. As I slipped into a seat by the open door, my unzipped bag spilled across the concrete floor. In a haze of disorientation, I collected my sprawled belongings and looked around the room. I realized Victoria’s face was the only one I recognized.

I’ve attended a few Counter Collective shows in NYC over the last few years, and each one brings a new group of unfamiliar faces. And this is, in ways, by design. Victoria’s mastery as a curator goes beyond balanced, impressive shows and extends into the social sphere, where she builds community through art. Her exhibitions function as social environments as much as visual ones, shaping conditions where dialogue, participation, and tension can unfold. To curate for her is to be in a relationship with others, their ideas, their artistry, and to create spaces that invite unexpected encounters and discoveries.


Photo courtesy of All Street Gallery

Seeing Desire featured work by Elinor Carucci, Mara Catalán, Marisa Chafetz, Hannah Edelman, Ashley McLean, Martha Naranjo Sandoval, Sophie Schwartz, and Ana Vallejo. Ana, Sophie, and Marisa were featured in the discussion I attended at the end of February. Victoria asked each panelist questions about their practice, her voice clear and measured in the bright room. Can desire be seen? How has art photography changed in the time of social media? In the time of the selfie? One artist referenced an essay by Rebecca Solnit about “the blue of distance,” where longing exists in what remains just out of reach. The lyrics of Caroline Polachek’s “Welcome to My Island” echoed in my mind: Desire, I want to turn into you.

Toward the end of the talk, the artists began asking each other questions, and the organized panel became a conversation. What emerged was less a moderated discussion than a live negotiation of meaning. Sophie admitted they were surprised that their work fell into the category of desire, while Marisa and Ana felt their work was explicitly rooted in it. They moved between agreement and gentle disagreement, revising their positions as they spoke. Victoria kept the conversation open, listening intently with the audience.

It was my first time seeing the show in person, and I scanned the walls, attempting to determine which artist was responsible for which work. Most of the photographs captured women. Some were colorful, others gestural; some faces were obscured, others looked toward the camera. I could make out most of the works from the back of the gallery, which was long and narrow, lit by floor-to-ceiling windows. Behind the panelists hung a sheer white curtain suspended from a curved rail. I wondered what it concealed.

When the panel ended, I waited for my turn to congratulate Victoria. She introduced me to Ana, a Colombian-born visual artist and community activator. Weeks earlier, on Valentine’s Day, Ana and Victoria had facilitated a community activation in the space inspired by her book, All These Feelings, which uses data and design to compile reflections on intimacy. I realized that her photos were the two most colorful in the room. In one of them, a nude couple embraces by a window, their faces turned away, cast in neon-pink shadows. I had planned to attend the February 14th event, but became reluctant to enter a room of strangers. I assumed we would reflect on the concept of desire together, and I hadn’t been in the right mood for that. The holiday was marked with unmet expectations, and later disagreement and repair with my partner. Still, I had wondered what I had missed out on. When I had texted Victoria to let her know I was feeling “too emo” to attend, she later replied, “Hope you wrote yourself a beautiful love letter.”


Photo courtesy of All Street Gallery

Victoria encouraged me to enter “the confessionary,” gesturing toward the curtained area behind us, a commemoration of what had transpired on Valentine’s Day at All Street. I stepped inside to find hundreds of white notecards sprawling across the walls, layered and overlapping. Each one responding to a single question: What do you long for?

~~~

On the Friday following the exhibition’s close, I met Victoria at a coffee shop in my neighborhood. She arrived wearing a winter coat, a chunky wool hat, and her infectious smile. We had met up a few times before, but this time I wanted to ask her about her photography practice, how it evolved into a curatorial one through Counter Collective, and what she envisioned for its future.

Victoria started at the beginning, with her childhood in Madrid. She first became interested in photography as a teenager, scrolling through images on Tumblr, Flickr, and the Rookie Mag website. “I’ve always been super nostalgic,” she told me. “I wanted to capture my teenage life.” Her siblings and friends became her first subjects.

She moved to New York to attend Barnard, where she studied computer science and psychology. After choosing this practical path, she continued photographing outside of class. Each week, she and her roommate would walk from campus to a photo lab on the Upper West Side to develop film, a ritual that sustained them over the years. In one of her first series, she photographed her classmates in their dorm rooms, the temporary worlds they built to feel at home. She recalls her formal education in class and her art education in the archives at Avery Library.

After graduating, she moved to the Bay Area for a teaching job and then landed in tech. There, she continued shooting on weekends, but felt disconnected from the local photography scene. “It was all very surfer dude with a film camera,” she said. “Which is great—but I didn’t feel totally represented.” Looking for connection, she began reaching out to other young female photographers online, eventually meeting Malindi Jo Walker, who shared similar experiences in male-dominated art spaces and had lived in the Bay Area for many years.

In 2020, the two co-founded Counter Collective, a photography network uplifting the voices of those historically excluded from traditional art spaces. They began by organizing informal Zoom critiques and artist talks in the early days of the pandemic. “I wanted to be more accountable to myself,” Victoria said, “and meet other photographers so we could exchange ideas and get inspired.” By 2021, the two were organizing exhibitions, and over the next few years, the collective expanded rapidly, hosting multiple shows annually and collaborating across disciplines.


Photo courtesy of Claire Puginier

“A lot of the shows were open calls,” she explained, “and then others were more curated. We were bridging this gap between photographers who were really dedicated to the practice and people who were just interested in photography and wanted to show their work.” That bridge between hobbyist and professional, artist and fan, became central to the collective’s ethos.

By 2023, Victoria found herself split between two demanding worlds: her day job in tech and her growing commitment to Counter Collective. “It was a huge Saturn return moment,” she said. She returned to New York to pursue an MFA in photography at the School of Visual Arts, seeking both technical rigor and a deeper immersion in the art world she had been building from the outside.

My first encounter with Victoria was in the early months of her return to NYC. We were both studying at SVA, in different graduate programs, and were introduced through a mutual friend in the Bay. We met at a birthday party at Dear Friend Books, a bookstore and wine bar that had opened close to my house in Bed-Stuy. Victoria was inquisitive and thoughtful, and had a warm, optimistic feeling about her. Weeks later, I saw that Counter Collective was hosting their first bicoastal show at Dear Friend, and walked over on my own to show support. Most times I visited the store, I read at the counter or browsed the book collection; it was a peaceful spot. When I arrived at the entrance on the night of the opening, the windows were misty, and a gaggle of artsy folks smoked cigarettes outside on the curb. I tried to find my new acquaintance, but could hardly push through the crowd.


Photo courtesy of Amit Chernichaw

~~~

What do you long for?

On Valentine’s Day, visitors entered All Street and were welcomed by Ana and Victoria. Ana asked each person to consider their longings and collect them on a white notecard. Together, they lit candles and placed them in a circle on the ground, forming a temporary altar to honor their desires. A box stood in the middle as a receptacle for finished notecards, keeping them safe. Later, the participants stood in a circle and read all of the cards out loud, to “unveil” the installation by speaking everyone's desires into the space.

In the confessional, I had anticipated reading romantic longings: for affection, for love, for amazing sex. But as I stood behind the curtain, digesting each note, my concept of desire stretched farther into my future, and outside of myself.

Peace, freedom, equality.
To party indefinitely.
For deep belonging, a sense of connection.
Madrid.
Valentine’s Day tropes only concealed the fact that longing couldn’t be contained to relationships. After I left the show, I found a park bench and pulled out my notepad again to write down my own longings. They weren’t the same as they had been weeks prior.


Photo courtesy of All Street Gallery

~~~

Now, alongside her studies in the Photography MFA program at the School of Visual Arts, Victoria works in Programs and Community Partnerships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she develops accessibility-focused programming for Spanish-speaking audiences. When she told me about her role at The Met, Victoria became pensive. “People always say that your career only makes sense from the rear view mirror, right?” Her experiences teaching 4th graders at a charter school in San Jose, CA, and setting up artist panels, film screenings, and programming through Counter Collective helped her land the job, even without the “official” blue-chip gallery chops she thought were required. On April 25, 2026, Victoria and her team at The Met organized a talk, the first in the museum's history completely in Spanish, called Nuestro New York: The Architecture of Frida Escobedo. Frida, a Mexican-born architect, joined architect and curator Laura González Fierro to discuss her new wing for The Met, the first wing designed by a woman, which is set to open in 2030. Whether at a major arts institution or at her nascent photography collective, Victoria collaborates with others to uplift the voices of women and marginalized groups, to make their work and mastery known.

Initially, Victoria considered Counter Collective a bicoastal project and collaborated with guest curators to put on shows while she worked behind the scenes. Malindi, Victoria’s co-founder in the collective, eventually moved to London. Victoria is hopeful that the project will continue to expand and host satellite shows. When I asked her about the project’s future, she said she wants it to move beyond exhibitions. She foresees Counter Collective becoming a resource: a space for knowledge sharing, critique, and access. As I spoke to her, the concept of access came up as a goal she is building towards: a network that supports photographers who share their work, tools, and skills to help each other expand their practices and ultimately situate themselves within the field.

In the artist talk at All Street, Victoria referenced a quote by photographer Emmet Gowin: “Kisses are among the vehicles I would use if I were not able to make pictures.” She tells me later about the importance of this quote and that it hung in her bedroom growing up, in the early days of her love for photography. Today, she shows her community affection by curating shows that celebrate friends, neighbors, and strangers who inspire her.

~~~

Counter Collective is currently building its summer programming. Follow @CounterPhotoCollective on Instagram to hear about upcoming film screenings and readings on photography in NYC, and Counter Collective on Substack for interviews with artists and photography-related musings.