Judges from this year include leading women from Black Women Photographers, femLENS, Photofusion and more. Together, they will select the two outstanding bodies of work and 20 single images that will be exhibited in a group show this year.
Polly Irungu is a multimedia journalist and the founder of Black Women Photographers, a global community and directory of 1000+ Black women and non-binary photographers.
As a self-taught photographer, writer, and founder, Polly’s work has been published in numerous publications, including Adobe’s Create Magazine, The New York Times, Reuters, Global Citizen, NPR, BBC News, Refinery29, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed News, CNN, and others.
Karla Guerrero is a fine art photographer and cultural manager based in Mexico City. Founder of Femgrafía, a platform for women photographers from Latin America and Spain. Since 2017 she has participated in an international scene with greater scope and representation of contemporary photography as a writer, speaker, and portfolio reviewer.
Guerrero is a member of various networks for dissemination and research in modern and contemporary art, contemporary Latin American art, and photography. As of 2020, she is part of the directory of photographers of the Contemporary Image Platform (PICS) by Centro de la Imagen Mexico. She has exhibited across Europe, the UK, the United States, and Mexico. Recently, she was selected by Artpil as one of the “30 under 30 women photographers”. Guerrero’s work and interests respond to concepts such as the transitory and the absent; memory, loss, and void.
Koral Carballo is a Mexican Photographer and Visual Artist telling and researching stories related to identity, violence, migration, and territory working at the intersection of art and journalism.
She is Catchlight Leadership Fellow 2021, POY LATAM 2nd place Nuestra Mirada Award 2021, Woman Photograph and Getty Images grantee 2019, We Women grantee 2019, Open Society Foundations Moving Walls 25 Fellow 2018, and received first place in the Latin American Photography Colloquium portfolio review 2017.
Koral has exhibited and projected his work in Spain, Switzerland, France, Marrakech, Brazil, United States of America, Uruguay, Colombia, Canada, Guatemala and Mexico. Carballo’s work is part of the art collection of Francisco Toledo Artist, Centro de la Imagen, Fundación Televisa and Open Society Foundations.
Melissa Bunni Elian works as a visual journalist and writer based in Yonkers, NY. Her images and words have been published in CNN, NPR, The New York Times, The Washington Post and NBC News. She’s also created work for various organizations like Google, The Equal Justice Initiative and UN Women.
Beginning her career with video in 2010 at The Journal News, in 2013, Bunni began freelancing as a photojournalist. After enrolling in Columbia Journalism School, May 2016, she was hired as a Multimedia Editor by NBCNews.com, where she’d remain throughout the 2016 election year. Ms. Elian graduated in October 2020 and is also an alumni of the Missouri Photo Workshop.67 and Eddie Adams Workshop XXX.
Bunni is the recipient of a grant from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting for a research trip to Johannesburg, South Africa for her multimedia report on the global impact of AFROPUNK.
Ms. Elian is currently working as a Photography Fellow at National Geographic on the Travel desk.
Alessia Locatelli lives and works in Milan, Italy. She is the artistic director of the Enrico Cattaneo’s archive and of Women Photography Biennial (BFF) in Mantua (Italy).
She’s an Independent Curator in the organisation of exhibitions with both public and private entities, in Italy and abroad while curating and consulting for artists and photographers. She is the signature of some art & photo magazines and referent of the Photography Dossier within the “CAM, catalogue of modern art” (ex-Bolaffi) published by the Editorial Giorgio Mondadori – Cairo Group. She organizes and teaches professional photo-curating and history of photography courses in universities, schools, and independent realities.
Nazik Armenakyan is a documentary photographer, co-founder and director of 4Plus Documentary Photography Center in Armenia. She started working as a photojournalist in 2002 at Armenpress news agency. Then she worked in Yerevan magazine, Forum magazine and ArmeniaNow.com, collaborating with Reuters agency. After completing a yearlong photojournalism course at the Caucasus Institute, organized by World Press Photo in 2004-2005, she started doing long-term documentary projects focusing her attention on individuals and social groups living on the margins of Armenian society.
A winner of several international awards she participated in many local and international group exhibitions in Armenia, USA, China, Hong Kong, India, Russia. In 2009 she got a Grand Prix award and First place in the “People and Faces” category in the Karl Bulla International Photo Contest for my long-term project “Survivors.”
The other significant achievement that allowed Armenakyan to grow as a documentary photographer was the “Human Rights and Photography” fellowship from Magnum Foundation at the New York University in 2011. From 2007, Nazik Armenakyan adopted two long-term and in-depth research projects that later developed into books. The first is Survivors (2005-2015), a photographic narrative about the survivors of the Armenian genocide. The other is The Stamp of Loneliness (2010-2013) about members of Yerevan’s closed transgender community. Her photographs have been published in The New York Times Lens blog, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, Politiken, WOZ magazine, The Funambulist magazine, Amnesty International and other international publications.
Since 2011, Natasha Egan has served as the Executive Director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago (MoCP), where she was previously the associate director and curator since 2000. She has organized over fifty exhibitions with a focus on contemporary Asian art and artists concerned with societal issues, such as the environment, war, and economics.
Egan was a guest curator for the 2010 FotoFest Biennial in Houston; the United States pavilion curator for the 2016 Photo Dubai Exhibition; and the 2019 Lianzhou Photography Biennial in China. Egan has contributed essays to numerous publications such as Beate Gütschow LS / S (Aperture); Michael Wolf: The Transparent City (Aperture); Black Maps: American Landscapes and the Apocalyptic Sublime with photographs by David Maisel (Steidl) and Taxonomy of Landscape with photographs by Victoria Sambunaris (Radius). For over a decade, she taught in the photography and humanities departments at Columbia College Chicago and holds a BA in Asian studies, MA in museum studies, and MFA in fine art photography.
Victoria Jonathan is the Co-Founder of Doors 门艺, a platform for art and culture exchange between China and the West. A graduate of Columbia University (East Asian studies) and La Sorbonne (Philosophy), she has been working and living between Paris and Beijing for 15 years.
Jonathan co-directed with Bérénice Angremy the Jimei x Arles International Photo festival (2017-2019), created in China by ‘Les Rencontres d’Arles’ and the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre. They created the first award dedicated to women photographers in China (‘Jimei x Arles Women Photographers Award’). She curated several exhibitions on Chinese art and photography such as “The Stars. Pioneers of contemporary art in China” (Paris, 2019), “Flowing Waters Never Return to the Source. Photographers Gazing at the River in China” (Abbaye de Jumièges, 2020), “Feng Li. White Night in Paris” and “Luo Yang. Of Every Genre“ (PhotoSaintGermain, 2021), “Lei Lei. Romance in Lushan Cinema“ (Les Rencontres d’Arles and Jimei x Arles, 2019)
Katy is a photography curator, advisor and mentor. She is Chair of the Board of Trustees of Photofusion in Brixton, a trustee of Photo Oxford and a member of the Maud Sulter Advisory Board. Katy has been focused on photography for the past 18 years, working with museums, festivals, galleries, collectors and artists in a variety of capacities such as curating exhibitions both in the UK and abroad, advising museums and collectors on acquisitions, running artists’ residencies and prizes and mentoring photography groups as well as writing exhibition catalogues and attending portfolio reviews in the UK and abroad.
Jekaterina Saveljeva is a documentary photographer from Estonia. She is the Founder of and Workshop Facilitator at femLENS, a non-profit association focused on providing documentary photography workshops to women and girls from diverse backgrounds. Alongside workshops, femLENS organises photo exhibitions, and publishing a women-only documentary photography magazine “We See” as well as books and zines.
Since 2015, femLENS has trained more than 100 women and girls from 15 different countries. Jekaterina’s work has been published and exhibited internationally.
