EXHIBIT 'What Does an Ideal Employee Look Like?' by Haley Morris Cafiero

25 Oct - 5 Dec 2025, Maison Française d'Oxford

Exhibition on view: 25 October – 5 December
Maison Française d’Oxford
Mon–Fri, 9am–5pm
Sat 25 Oct, Sat 8 Nov & Sat 22 Nov, 1–5pm

What Does an Ideal Employee Look Like? employs humour, performance and artificial intelligence (AI) to visualise the biases hidden in algorithms that power employment applicant assessment software used by many major corporations. Applicants "interview" with the software as it analyses their physical features and provides a score of desirable employee personality characteristics. The software's algorithms are biased and assess potential applicants with large eyes as being “more honest” or those with high cheekbones as “better leaders”.

To challenge the common corporate use of this discriminatory software, I collaborated with a computer scientist to recreate the AI driven software, enabling me to do performances of job interviews while I manipulate my face to achieve high ideal employee personality scores. As I change the shape of my face and its components, the videos document changing scores as the software assesses me for one of twenty personality traits that are ideal for employers. 

Traits include agreeableness, openness, or extraversion, and are further broken down into subcategories such as leadership skills and competitiveness amongst others. Once I have achieved the highest score for each category, I freeze my face by securing its position with tape. I then capture the result as a parody workplace headshot portrait.

www.haleymorriscafiero.com

This exhibition is presented as part of Press the Shutter, Type the Prompt: Photography & Truth in Times of AI, organised by Goran Gaber, Andrew Cusworth, and Anne-Sophie Gabillas within the Channels of Digital Scholarship initiative by the Maison Française d’Oxford and Digital Scholarship @Oxford. It brings together international artists who explore generative AI as a tool, a narrative device, a critical lens, and a poetic medium — revealing fresh possibilities at the intersection of art, technology, and storytelling.

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Part performer, part artist, part provocateur, Haley Morris-Cafiero uses her photography as an activist voice to fight discrimination and social invisibility. Morris-Cafiero’s work has been widely exhibited in solo and group exhibitions around the world, and has been featured in numerous publications including the Guardian, Le Monde, The New York Times and Salon. An Associate Professor and Subject Leader of Visual Arts at De Montfort University, she holds a MFA from the University of Arizona, and earned her practice-based PhD from Westminster University in 2023. Nominated for the Prix Pictet in 2014, the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize in 2021, and shortlisted for the 2025 BMW Art Makers Award, Morris-Cafiero’s first monograph, The Watchers, was published in 2015, while her second, The Bully Pulpit, was published in 2019. Morris-Cafiero’s work is also featured in the 2021 publication, Photography – A Feminist History, by Emma Lewis published by Tate. Originally born in Atlanta, Georgia, Morris-Cafiero lives in the United Kingdom.

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