Social Work’s Marshall Combines Two Passions

By Barbara Jester

A native of Seattle, Katherine “Katie” Leah Marshall, a graduating senior in the School of Social Work, always wanted to come to New York.

“My family was originally from here, and I’d dreamed about living in New York,” she says. “I chose NYU because of its great reputation, especially for the kind of internships you can get.”

Her most recent internship has been with the Hudson Guild Settlement House in Chelsea where she worked with pre-schoolers in the Head Start program, in the after-school program, and most important to her, with teens. While at the Hudson Guild she combined her deep interest in working with at-risk teens with her other passion — photography.

Marshall has been taking pictures since she was very young, has taken professional photography courses at the Steinhardt School, and worked as an assistant to a celebrity wedding photographer last summer. When some of the teenagers she was working with expressed a desire to learn photography, she started a workshop. In order to get the equipment needed – cameras, film, darkroom equipment, she tapped the contacts she had made on her summer job and also put ads on craigslist. The result was thousands of dollars worth of equipment as well as guest lectures by some of the celebrity photographers she’d worked with. The students, who range in age from 13-18, were soon traveling around the city with Katie on photo shoots.

“These teens rarely got to leave the few city blocks surrounding where they live,” Marshall says. “The workshop gave them the rare opportunity to see much more of their own city.”

Marshall also used her contacts to get photo printing services donated from the Color Resource Center on 22nd Street.

Thus, on May 19 (and running through June 9) the students’ photographs will be on display at the newly renovated gallery at the Hudson Guild, located at 441 W. 26th Street.

Marshall’s future plans: this summer she will work at the Hudson Guild as a paid employee, continuing the photography workshop and running art therapy groups before continuing on for her M.S.W. degree. Her future goal, naturally enough, is to do clinical work with adolescents, concentrating on group therapy.