Claudio Eshun (aka Don Claude) is a photography-based artist and educator at Harvard University. He received his Bachelor of Science in Biological Sciences from Bridgewater State University in 2019 and a Master of Fine Arts in Photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2022. Born in Ghana, he lived in Italy until age 9 and was then raised in Worcester, Massachusetts. Eshun reflects on and reimagines scenes from his own history. By assembling photographs -- found, collected, and made -- Eshun explores his multiple pasts and possibilities for the future. He was shortlisted for the 11th Kassel Dummy Award in 2020, which lead to the publication of his zine dromo. Eshun’s work has been shown at the Harvard Art Museum, Worcester Art Museum and Trustman Art Gallery at Simmons University.

Looking outward through the eyes of my mom, my lens on the world became more graceful as a young teen. The challenges of others put my personal, familial and judicial hardships in perspective.

My family history --and our reclamation of a new home-- puts us within a context where identities are constructed and deconstructed, and subjects us to the tensions caused by adaptation and assimilation. Our attempts to accustom ourselves to the notion of alienation have had a profound impact on my work. In my photographs, I reflect on and reimagine scenes from my own personal history: I see images from Ghana and Italy and more recently from America. I incorporate all these visual languages into the images I create. As a once-stateless person who had to learn how to navigate institutions, cultures and languages, my work merges my distinct identities as an African, black, hypervisible and invisible man in America.