Katherine Wolkoff is a photographer and Associate Professor of Photography at Parsons School of Design whose work explores absence, crisis, and the unseen in the natural world.

Her current project, Night Migrations, documents six critical stopover sites along the Atlantic Flyway—from Nova Scotia to Cuba—investigating environmental disruption through photographic traces rather than direct representation. Central to the work are collaborations with two female ornithologists—one historical, one contemporary—whose methods of meticulous observation and data collection inform her practice. Her work has recently expanded into speculative landscape collage, recombining thousands of field photographs to construct imagined geographies from inside the birds' memory itself.

Wolkoff's work has been exhibited at Benrubi Gallery, Sasha Wolf Gallery, and Danziger Projects, and is held in public collections including Yale University Library, the RISD Museum, and the Norton Museum of Art. Her photographs have been featured in Artforum, The New Yorker, and Aperture. She received her MFA from Yale School of Art.

Twice a year, millions of birds embark on their migratory journey under cover of darkness. Over the past 25 years, more than 3 billion breeding adults have vanished from North American skies due to habitat loss, light pollution, and industrialization — a crisis that exposes a world typically unnoticed and unseen by humans.

Night Migrations reimagines this odyssey through photography, field observation, and artistic impression. Over five years, Katherine photographed six locations along the Atlantic Flyway—Nova Scotia's seaweed-choked coastlines, Vermont's beetle-damaged forests, Block Island's preserved habitat, Georgia's light-polluted shipping corridors, Cuba's freshwater cenotes, and a Texas site where federal lands have been appropriated for space exploration—using pinhole, performance, still life, and astrophotography to document traces of migration rather than migration itself.

As the project evolved, Katherine’s central question shifted from What do the birds see? to What do they remember? This opened an entirely new body of work: speculative landscape collages that cut and recombine thousands of field photographs to construct imagined geographies from inside the birds' memory itself.