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.