Every year, creative grad students from across the disciplines submit compelling images of their research and scholarship to the Image of Research competition. To accompany each image submission, the creator writes a short paragraph explaining how the image relates to their wider academic work, giving us a glimpse behind the scenes.

We caught up with some of the award winners from the 2026 Image of Research competition to ask them more about their process. Enjoy this interview with Michelle Patiño-Flores, a graduate student in Anthropology and First Place winner in this year’s contest, and then view the video to hear Patiño-Flores read her award-winning submission, "Visions of Freedom".

Why did you enter Image of Research this year?

I entered the competition this year because I wanted to share what I consider to be the heart of my research, particularly from a methodological perspective. I aspire for my ethnographic research to be guided by a spirit of collaboration, life-affirming ethics, and playful rigor... which comes from the loving and pronounced technical critiques that fuel and improve all artistic creation, especially among friends.

What was the process of coming up with your image?

I took this picture in a kitchen where I was fed many times and to which I owe a tremendous debt. The image is part of a larger series I developed in collaboration with some of my research interlocutors who are artists and photographers. As I closed out my final weeks of dissertation fieldwork, I invited three of them to share my final roll of film with me on my camera. It was a way to commemorate our friendship but also to document ourselves in this city, in this country that is shifting every day. We all took different types of pictures on this shared roll, but all of my frames are exercises in composing portraits of them in weird or experimental formats.

What did you learn or take away from this experience?

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I think that winning this prize can be seen as comment on the merit of ethical, collaborative research. Although I have been practicing photography for many years, it was only in Havana when I was everyday chatting, arguing, laughing, creating, and eating with artists, and—crucially--learning from them, that I took it as a serious exercise, which I had previously been afraid to do. It was the artists around me who challenged me to step firmly into the role of visual artist myself and use that as a real form of knowledge creation in my academic inquiry. This picture reminds me that my practice and this prize was made possible only because they insisted I meter light correctly, they fed me in their homes, and they regaled me with stories about their lives and their theories about the world. What I added to this picture was a structure to protect their generosity, care, and kindness.

Read Patiño-Flores' entry

I collaborate with Black (and) queer Cuban artists to understand their practices of freedom in a contested political landscape. Protecting the anonymity of my interlocutors is an especially important part of my research, as public critique of the Revolutionary government is sometimes met with state violence. For my ethnographic fieldwork, I practice experimental film photography that obscures and preserves the identity of those represented. To structure my images, I draw from Black Studies theorist Christina Sharpe to apply her techniques of Black Annotation and Redaction. Through her conceptual and technical tools, I create images that protect my interlocutors from uninvited public consumption and state scrutiny and yet welcome the gazes of friends and kin who can readily identify the people and places in the images. The images are therefore intelligible only to the predetermined public of the subjects involved: they are relational... similar to how freedom is relational. It is achieved through communal efforts, for the benefit of communal life.

Visit the Image of Research website for more information about this celebration of graduate student research.  

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This interview was conducted by Brandon Stauffer, Videographer here at the Graduate College. Brandon came to the Graduate College with a background in journalism and is now working to showcase the impact of Higher Education at Illinois.