Katalin Ladik, poet, performance artist and actress (HU)

Katalin Ladik (Novi Sad, 1942) is a Hungarian poet, performance artist and actress. She was born in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia (now called Serbia) and in the last 20 years she has lived and worked alternately in Novi Sad, Serbia, in Budapest, Hungary and on the island of Hvar, Croatia. Parallel to her written poems she also creates sound poems and visual poems, performance art, writes and performs experimental music and audio plays. She is also a performer and an experimental artist (happenings, mail art, experimental theatrical plays). She explores language through visual and vocal expressions, as well as movement and gestures. Her work includes collages, photography, records, performances and happenings in both urban and natural environments. Feminism is another important component of her multifaceted work. Rather than distinguish between literary, musical, theatrical and visual disciplines, Ladik’s work revolves around the body, the voice, and phonetic and poetic experimentation.

Laia Abril, multidisciplinary artist working with photography, text, video and sound (ES)

Laia Abril (Barcelona, 1986) is a multidisciplinary artist working with photography, text, video and sound. After graduating from college with a degree in Journalism she moved to New York to attend photography courses at the ICP. There she decided to focus on telling intimate stories which raises uneasy and hidden realities related with sexuality, eating disorders and gender equality. In 2009 she enrolled in a 5-years artist residency at FABRICA, the Benetton Research Centre in Treviso, Italy, where she worked as a creative editor and staff photographer at COLORS magazine. Abril’s projects are produced across platforms as installations, books, web docs, and films. Her work has been shown internationally in the United States, Canada, the UK, China, Poland, Germany, Holland, Switzerland, Turkey, Greece, France, Italy and Spain. Her works are held in private collections and museums, such as Musée de l’Elysée and Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland and MNAC in Barcelona. More recently she has been awarded the Revelación Photo España Award, Fotopress Grant and Prix de la Photo Madame Figaro for her exhibition at Les Rencontres d’Arles (2016) A History of Misogyny, chapter one: On Abortion. After completing her five-year project On Eating Disorders, Abril has embarked on the new long-term project, A History of Misogyny. Its first chapter On Abortion was published by Dewi Lewis on 2017; and now she is currently developing a second chapter, On Rape Culture, together with a series of different series and installations under the umbrella of A History of Misogyny.

Nina Berman, documentary photographer, filmmaker, author and educator (USA)

Nina Berman (USA, 1960) is a documentary photographer, filmmaker, author and educator. Her wide-ranging work looks at American politics, militarism, post violence trauma and resistance. She is the author of three books: Purple Hearts – Back from Iraq (2004), Homeland (2008), and An Autobiography of Miss Wish (2017), a story told with a survivor of sexual violence and reported over 25 years. Her photographs and videos have been exhibited at more than 100 venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and Dublin Contemporary. Her work has been recognized with awards in art and journalism from the World Press Photo Foundation, Pictures of the Year International, Open Society Foundation, and New York Foundation for the Arts, Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies and Hasselblad. She is a member of NOOR images, a photography and film collective based in Amsterdam. And she is an associate professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism where she directs the photography program. Nina lives in her hometown of New York City.

Tomoko Sawada, artist (JAP)

Tomoko Sawada (born in Kobe, 1977) studied at the Seian University of Art and Design. She uses photography to explore the relationship between one’s inner life and outer image. Her works borrow compositional devices from familiar photographic formats such as the school portrait and wedding and fashion photography, restaging them in a satirical mode so as to lay bare their various stereotypes and assumptions. Predominantly casting herself in the role of the model, Sawada has built an extraordinary cast of characters that present a humorous and incisive portrait of the Japanese society. She has been a recipient of the Grand Prize at the Canon New Cosmos of Photography, the ICP Infinity Award, and Kimura Ihei Memorial Photography Award. Tomoko Sawada lives and works in Kobe, Japan.

Arvida Byström, artist (SE)

Arvida Byström, the Swedish, selfie-stick obsessed, Instagram-native creates images that converse with our online identity and the tension between the pleasures and anxieties that surface through digital culture. Arvida’s work exists within its own web language of pastels, flowers, selfies and pink USB cables.

Fiona Rogers, Global Director of Business Development for Magnum Photos International (UK)

Fiona Rogers is the Global Director of Business Development for Magnum Photos International. working to implement new business innovations and strategic partnerships. Prior to this she was the Cultural & Education Manager, conceiving and delivering international exhibitions and events and creating Magnum’s global Education department in 2006.

Fiona is also the founder of Firecracker, a platform supporting female photographers. In 2012, Firecracker launched an annual grant, offered to photographers to complete a long-term documentary photography project. In 2017 she co-authored the book Firecrackers: Female Photographers Now, featuring over 30 contemporary women practitioners, published by Thames & Hudson.

Fiona has a strong interest in emerging photographers and has been involved in international platforms such as Recontres D’Arles, FORMAT Festival and the Singapore International Photography Festival. She has participated as a judge for several notable competitions including the Mack First Book Award and the Getty Images Grant for Editorial Photography. She is on the Board of the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol and an advisor to the Royal Photographic Society.