Susan Hayre Thelwell

Susan Hayre Thelwell grew up on a ranch in Terrell County, Texas, on the edge of the Chihuahuan desert in the far southwest of the state. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1997 in theater at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. After college she studied and traveled abroad in Argentina and Chile for a year before moving to Maine where she earned a Professional Certificate in photography at Rockport College in Rockport, Maine. In 2007, she and her husband relocated to Santa Fe.

Thelwell is a freelance photographer who has taught at the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops, the Maine Media Workshops, for the Texas Photographic Society, and has worked as a summer teaching assistant at the Maine Photography Workshops. She is an Adjunct Instructor in Media Arts at the Santa Fe Community College. She has also worked as a digital lab assistant at Santa Fe Workshops and continues to work as a digital assistant to the photographer Debbie Fleming Caffery. The artist's work has been acquired by collections including the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, the Photo Archive of the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe, New Mexico Art in Public Places at Ft. Sumner, New Mexico; and the Centro Fotografico Alvarez Bravo in Oaxaca, Mexico. Her photographs have appeared in numerous juried exhibitions across the country, including two shows in 2009 selected by Katherine Ware and the Galisteo Basin Photography Project exhibition at Photo-Eye Gallery, selected by Rixon Reed and Mary Anne Redding.