Santa Monica - 259 19th Street - CA 90402
Del Vaz Projects is a nonprofit art space in Los Angeles that has steadily built a reputation for rigor, generosity, and intellectual depth since its founding in 2014 by Jay Ezra Nayssan. Originating in a home-based setting in Santa Monica, the organization has retained a sense of intimacy and experimentation even as its reach has expanded across the city. Its name, drawn from a Persian expression meaning openhanded and openhearted, reflects an ethos rooted in care, curiosity, and sustained collaboration with artists and thinkers from diverse backgrounds.
At the core of Del Vaz Projects is a curatorial platform that supports exhibitions and programs spanning visual art, performance, and moving-image practices. Photography plays a vital role within this framework, often intersecting with film, archival research, and conceptual inquiry. Exhibitions regularly engage photographic works as both documents and speculative objects, exploring themes such as memory, displacement, authorship, and the politics of representation. By foregrounding photography alongside time-based and performative media, Del Vaz Projects highlights the medium’s flexibility and its capacity to operate across artistic and historical registers.
The organization’s commitment to research and publishing further strengthens its photography program. Through its research collective and independent press, Del Vaz Projects produces exhibition texts, artist books, and catalogs that contextualize photographic practices within broader cultural and theoretical conversations. These publications frequently draw on archival photographs, personal image collections, and newly commissioned photographic work, positioning photography as a key tool for storytelling, scholarship, and critical reflection.
Del Vaz Projects also functions as an incubator for artists, archives, and estates, offering support to underfunded practitioners through its artist production fund. This support enables ambitious photographic projects that might otherwise lack institutional backing, from experimental image-based installations to long-term research-driven bodies of work. Grounded in values of inclusivity and specificity, Del Vaz Projects continues to foster meaningful cultural dialogue, using photography as one of its most powerful instruments for connection, inquiry, and collective imagination.
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