2026 SPE Annual Conference: Catalyst for Exchange
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print this pageMy Divine Comedy: Queer Mythmaking as Reclamation
Danielle Owensby
Friday, October 10 - 11:00AM to 11:35AM
College for Creative Studies
In My Divine Comedy, I reimagine Dante Alighieri's journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise as a deeply personal allegory of queer identity, grief, and spiritual reclamation. Through self-portraiture, staged scenes, and symbolic imagery, the project turns Dante's medieval cosmology inward, mapping my own passage from inherited shame toward self-acceptance and queer liberation.
This presentation will weave together images and narrative, moving between the personal story that gave rise to the work and the research that informs it. By placing my photographs in dialogue with broader histories of art, allegory, and sacred narrative, I explore how photography can both reclaim and reinvent inherited myths, transforming them into new frameworks for identity, memory, and belonging.
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Danielle Owensby
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