Rachel Elizabeth Seed

Bio

Originally from London, Brooklyn-based photographer and filmmaker Rachel Elizabeth Seed is currently in post-production on her documentary, A Photographic Memory, which was featured in the IFP’s Spotlight on Documentaries at Independent Film Week in 2014, won the Roy W. Dean Filmmakers Grant, and is fiscally sponsored by Women Make Movies. Rachel’s work has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, TIME Inc., and New York Magazine. She has contributed cinematography to VICE as well as the documentaries Memories of a Penitent Heart, which premiered at TriBeCa 2016 , and Supergirl. Her photography has been exhibited with the International Center of Photography (ICP) and The Shpilman Institute for Photography and supported with grants from the Maine Media Workshops and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. As curator and exhibition organizer, Rachel produced “OCCUPY!” for the ICP, and assisted with PDN Magazine’s exhibit with the Annenberg Space for Photography in 2014.

Reflection

I waited for about five hours on a hot day in a slow-moving line filled with thousands of Pope-sighting hopefuls. Finally past the park entry, I broke free from the crowd to secure a spot near the road where the procession would be. After a few false alarms, the crowd erupted in cheers and tears during the brief sighting of Pope Francis’s Central Park drive-by, which most strived to capture for posterity on their mobile devices. Witnessing the event, I was surprised to be swept up in the waves of intense emotion myself, as the Pope passed through.