Armelis D’Orville

Armelis D’Orville a 29-year-old freelance photographer on the rise, born and raised in Corona, Queens, developed a passion for the art of photography while taking a 35mm film, black and white course at Queensborough Community College.

Once the class ended, D’Orville bought a digital camera and began to experiment with film, self-teaching herself for about three years. Soon after, she began to venture into her own projects. It wasn’t easy. D’Orville is a single mother, who holds down a full-time job while she is in school.

Excited about photography, she started to create her first independent, street documentary entitled, “103 Days of Corona.” The series was composed of stills and portraits documenting Corona, the neighborhood she grew up in. “To this day, I don’t know how I did half the things to even get this to happen, but it definitely shaped the way I think of myself as an artist. That’s when I really decided, I want to take this more seriously,” said D’Orville. “103 Days of Corona” was one of her first projects to be showcased in an exhibition in Long Island City, Queens, with the help of her then-mentor.

A few years later at the age of 25, D’Orville decided to take things a step further in her career. She enrolled in the BFA Photography program at the Fashion Institute of Technology. “When I went to FIT, it was different because I wanted to learn more,” said D’Orville. For a while, she had a difficult time blending in with a group of students that were significantly younger than her. “All my classmates were like 18, 17, and I got there like, ‘oh my god, am I making a mistake? I felt like an alien, I felt so strange, I felt limited.” Like D’Orville, many people battle with that social stigma, feeling like they’re behind. But as time passed, she realized that “where I am, is where I need to be.”

After a while at FIT, she was in group critiques, where her classmates continually reminded her how much they looked up to her “Sometimes when we feel like we can’t do something, you never know who’s looking and thinking, how do you do it?” she said. “There have been some opportunities that have come in this past year that I did not think I was capable of doing.”

One of her biggest passion projects, “Own your Pajón,” has attested to D’Orville’s hard work and determination. This project was inspired by her daughter, Leyanna, who began to ask questions about her course, thick, curly hair. While teaching her daughter to embrace her hair, she began to transition back to her own naturally curly hair and learned more about the correlation between her community and its acceptance of natural hair. What had started as a moment between mother and daughter blossomed into a multimedia series, exploring natural hair and its historical stigmatization in the Dominican community.

As she exits her last year in her twenties, she has discovered that she is at a point where she feels the most confident and sure of herself. “I’ve had to learn to give myself the space to nurture my relationships and not just with other people but with myself,” said D’Orville. “Everything is perfect the way it’s happening. I think that the idea of being late now for me just feels like something I have to unlearn.”