Regional Workspace Residency

June 1 – August 31, 2026

Maryel Pryce is an emerging visual storyteller from Lewiston, New York, a small town minutes from Niagara Falls. She graduated from Rochester Institute of Technology in 2026, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photojournalism. In addition to her studies, she was involved with the National Press Photographers Association student chapter at RIT, balancing two roles as president and public relations chair. Maryel is interested in the intersection between history and the present, and how the two can learn from each other. Her work reflects  curiosity about place, memory, and the ways in which lived experiences shape identity over time.

Maryel Pryce will be working on a project entitled, At Least I Am Living Now, where she is rooting out the parallel stories of the toxic environmental history of her hometown of Lewiston, NY and the toxicity within her familial history. Maryel is centering the Niagara River and the Lake Ontario Ordinance Works (LOOW) zone which holds 250,000 cubic yards of radioactive waste from the Manhattan Project.

“I grew up in Lewiston NY, a small village that sits on the Niagara River just ten minutes north of the natural wonder, Niagara Falls.

What was seen as an extraordinary landscape was at the same time seen as a bounteous commodity and a symbol of industrial exploitation. For two centuries the rush of the waterfalls have powered the turbines that provide ever-abundant inexpensive electricity to the United States and Canada. In present time, the city has become a ghost town full of radioactive waste dumps and abandoned factories. One of these waste dumps is located right in my backyard.

Growing up my father, Stuart, would often drive me to school. Every morning when we pulled into my school, the Geiger counter in the back of his car would pulse and click. This was normal to me and him. My father also grew up in Lewiston and attended the same school situated in the middle of the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works (LOOW) zone. LOOW is a 7,567-acre site located in the towns of Lewiston and Porter, N.Y. 250,000 cubic yards of radioactive waste from the Manhattan Project were dumped between the years 1941-1944. His childhood home on Cain Road is also in the LOOW zone. My father’s existence was entangled with this toxic landscape.

My father was a radiological control technician monitoring the contamination in the LOOW zone. The traumatic loss of his parents impacted his life in ways I can’t fathom. I often wondered if it had to do with the toxic environment surrounding them. In the summer of 2022, two weeks before I left for college, he exited his home with nothing but the clothes on his back due to drug addiction.

In August of 2025 I began creating a book that started as an exploration of my father’s and family’s life in a toxic landscape outside Niagara Falls, NY, but it slowly evolved into my restless search for peace and understanding in my family’s life amid my father’s ghostly disappearance. I spent many months searching through my father’s abandoned room, looking through boxes of his life and scanning archival materials such as his clothing, photographs, documents, and personal memorabilia. I created a book that showed his disappearance in a linear timeline, using his journal, my journal, and my mom’s journal to guide the story.

From the beginning of creating this story, I have been interested in the connection between toxic masculinity, the site, and my father, but I had to build the initial part of the story first before I could get to that. Using the time and space given with this residency, I want to continue to refine the work I have started and build upon the narrative of the parallels between burying toxic waste and burying toxic trauma.”