Open Enrollment Starts June 1, 2026
Henry Horenstein. Bonnet Shores Recreation Center, Narragansett, 1979. Rhode Island Folklife Project, Library of Congress.
How It Works
MEMORY CULT was born on May 5, 2022. Since then we’ve operated a sold out private community of women photographers from around the world. Doors to Active Membership open twice a year in June and December. Enrollment dates:
JUNE 1 — MEMBER PRE-SALE
Current MEMORY CULT members are offered the opportunity to keep their Active Membership, or transition their Silent Seat to Active. Historically, 85% of our enrollments come from renewals. Some semesters fill entirely from renewals alone, leaving no public enrollments.
JUNE 8 — PUBLIC ENROLLMENT
If any seats remain they become open to the public on June 8. In the past this includes anywhere up to 10 seats. Your best bet for securing your Active Seat is to start with a Silent Seat and transition your membership on June 1.
Manifesto
MEMORY CULT is the equidistant point between two good places: the university and the dive bar. This mixture of intellect and play, personal and creative, practical and spiritual, is our distinct core. MC is a space — for ricochet, contagion, creative role-play, exploring the unfinished, presenting the completed, wondering out loud, seeking, finding, exchanging experience and being exposed to new ways of seeing. In response to the limitations of social media and the institutions, it is a space for images and the image-maker.
MEMORY CULT curriculum is non-matriculating, non-hierarchical and non-linear. Prompts, projects & critiques are invitations to make contact with ourselves, others, and the world, which can never be early or late.
Content is approached as a buffet: take what's desirable and leave the rest. Come back for seconds. The private group is open forum; although each month focuses on a project with supporting texts and images, any post is fair game and encouraged. Vernacular, documentary and fine art photography are the overlapping triplets we love.
Are we a school? Community? Artist commune? Global collective journal? Support group? Treehouse? Emotional nudist colony? Our motto above all: stay loose. Broader than genre, our scope is personal and exploratory photography. We exist to strengthen the individual in creative calling. Our structure helps to locate the person within the work, the voice within the person and the photography that voice alone can create. MC is a home.
ABOUT OUR FOUNDER
Anastasia Pagonas (b. 1988, New York) is a photographer, writer, teacher and founder based in the American Southwest. Her writing explores the conditions for creative freedom and moral photography in the digital age. For 19 years she has photographed families, creating hardcover art books and large format prints for her clients and audience. After leaving her role as a university art gallery coordinator, she founded MEMORY CULT in 2022. She is mother to Vivian, Eleanor and Everett.