Alia Chand is a Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist who frequently focuses on film photography as a medium for conveying her artistic vision.
Alia’s artistic practice investigates processes of growth, decay, and renewal within the natural world. She works primarily with film photography, producing both black-and-white and color works focused on light and texture across a variety of environments. Alia is especially interested in moments that may seem minor or visually unresolved—fallen branches, grasses, and undergrowth, in particular—and in how these elements interact with their larger environments. Each photograph holds stories of stress, adaptation, decay, and growth within the landscape. These spaces challenge the traditional notion of nature photography as a broad, static scene, and Alia’s work seeks to situate the viewer within intimate, often overlooked moments in a fragile, ever-changing environment.
At a time when conversations about conservation and protection often focus, understandably, on larger environments and ecosystems as collective units, Alia aims to create intimate interactions between viewer and subject. She asks viewers to reconsider their relationship to the natural world, valuing these habitats not only for their beauty as spectacle, but also for their complexity amid significant ongoing ecological precarity. Through her work, Alia hopes to create a space for patient attention, where close observation becomes a means of acknowledging the complexity and fragility of spaces that demand greater care in the present moment. Alia will bring this lens to her upcoming Handtmann Photography Prize solo exhibition next April, where she will focus on expanding how sites in Southern California are engaged with, understood, and valued.
Currently, Alia is a Dean’s List student pursuing a double major in Art (Photography) and Communication at the University of Southern California’s Roski School of Art and Design and Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Alia is the 2026 recipient of the Handtmann Prize for Photography at USC, a $10,000 grant awarded to one undergraduate student in the Roski School of Art and Design to research for, produce, and present a monthlong solo exhibition of their design.
