We are excited to announce Houston wedding and portrait photographer Brandi Cadette (@peculiarpeopleproductions) as the 12th and final winner in this iteration of the Alpha Female+ grant. For her grant-winning project “Crushed Black,” she will create a photo series highlighting different Black women in different industries and sharing more stories about their life experiences.

For her project, “Crushed Black,” Brandi Cadette says she wants to create awareness and break a stigma that she and many other Black women have been made to feel.

Cadette says that she wants “Crushed Black,” to create awareness and break a stigma that she and many other Black women have been made to feel. “[As a child,] I would often find myself getting made fun of for not being ‘Black enough,’” she explains. “Only very recently did I learn that a lot of other Black women experience the same criticisms. Many other Black women have been made to feel that their blackness, their natural born skin, was not validated because they don’t act like, look like, sound like, or think like the societal and stereotypical norms of a black female.”

Her project is named after the editing technique of reducing the dynamic range in a photo. “When you crush your blacks in an image, all the greyish areas become black too, there’s no details or diversity in the blacks, it’s just that…black. I feel like that symbolizes the box that I and so many others have been subconsciously expected to fit into.”

Stay tuned to Alpha Universe as we follow Cadette and her project, the final in this iteration of the Alpha Female+ grant. Keep an eye on the Alpha Female page for future updates about the program and see all the past grant winners and their projects HERE.