Paula Endo

Endo Trees

Endo Cup


Endo Moon

Endo BedEndo 1A

A documentary and fine art photographer, Paula Endo earned her B.A. at U.C. Berkeley and UCLA, California and an M.A.T. in fine arts at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She has been a teacher for over twenty-five years, teaching at the high school and college level.

1980-81, National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Grant Award, Endo and a colleague produced the Arlington Photographic Documentary Project (APDP). Endo has exhibited the APDP work and--with various local and regional funding--other documentary and fine art photography projects in group and solo exhibitions regionally, nationally, and in Egypt and China. In 1996 she founded and directed an afternoon photography and service program, and with other volunteers worked with teenagers in a largely immigrant and refugee community in Arlington. Endo’s students documented their unique community and had their work exhibited widely including at the Smithsonian and U.S. Geological Survey; they also published their work in an art-quality book entitled "Portraits from the Pike: A Celebration of Community." This was made possible by multiple grants from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities (VFH) as well as funding from the NEA, Arlington Community Foundation, the Arlington Commission for the Arts, and many other groups, together with the support of Arlington County and sponsorship by the Urban Alternatives Foundation and Columbia Pike Revitalization Organization of Arlington.

Currently Endo is with-the Columbia Pike Photo Documentary Project, which she co-founded in 2004, working together with a team of photographers, and both history and oral history consultants to document the dramatic socio-cultural changes that have taken place along “The Pike,” a main street in Arlington as it transitioned from a mainly white to one of the most diverse areas in Northern Virginia. Their work has been on display in a number of sites in the DC Metro area. The project started in 2005 with grants from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and continues to grow with various other funding sources from around Virginia.

"Though most of my serious work has been documentary in nature, I have always been making pictures that didn't fit any category except what can be called ‘personal vision.’ Photography for me is a lens looking both outward and inward. It is a means of exploring and connecting with the world with my inner eyes open. I find my photographic imagery and mode of operating express a tension between introspection and documentation, between inner reflection and outer service--and sometimes encompass both tendencies at once."

The Middle Street Gallery's mission is to support quality and innovation in the arts, to promote the exposure, exhibition and sale of its members' work, and to provide opportunities for the interaction between artists and the community in a regional, rural setting.