Verdiana Albano Receives The 1st Prize Of The PhMuseum 2025 Women Photographers Grant

I Ain't From No East Coast investigates a multi-ethnic identity through staging and documentation. Niharika Chauhan claims the New Generation Prize. Read all the judges' motivations and see the selected projects of this 9th edition.

An independent jury comprised of Monica de Miranda (Visual Artist, Filmmaker, and Researcher), Katy Hundertmark (Curator and Managing Editor of Foam Magazine), Amak Mahmoodian (Multidisciplinary Artist and Educator), and Diana Markosian (Documentary Photographer, Writer, and Filmmaker) has assigned the €5,000 PhMuseum 2025 Women Photographers Grant Main Prize to German-Angolan photographer Verdiana Albano for her project I Ain't From No East Coast. Judge Katy Hundertmark motivates the choice on behalf of the jury:

“In her layered and multi-dimensional project I Ain’t From No East Coast Verdiana Albano moves through the remnants of East Germany as if sifting through a family attic – lifting files and photographs, as well as furniture. Her work investigates the architecture of a childhood shaped by a white mother, a Black father, and a system already cracking at its seams. Between the posed and the documentary, she threads her own image alongside institutional archives, reminding us that the personal is always political. What emerges is a quiet insistence that identity is not inherited whole, but assembled – piece by piece – across time, place, and possibility.”

The €2,000 second prize was claimed by American photographer Irene Antonia Diane Reece, who presented the project Don't Cry For Me When I'm Gone. Judge Monica de Miranda elaborates on the jury's choice:

“The photographic portraits in Don't Cry For Me When I'm Gone by Irene Antonia Diane Reece delve into the artist’s family history and the artist's family archives, proposing new ways of how we use these tools to tell stories about place, community care, and memory. While exploring the themes of love, loss, and the enduring strength of cultural identity, the work endures the potential to juxtapose archival imagery with contemporary elements, creating a dialogue between the past and present.”

With her work (Tsy) Possible, French photographer Charlotte Yonga was granted the third prize of €1,000. Diana Markosian comments on her work:

“Charlotte Yonga's (Tsy) Possible gives voice to a part of the world that remains profoundly underrepresented, offering a cinematic and deeply sensitive portrait of Madagascar’s emotional and cultural landscape. Through her thoughtful collaboration with her subjects, she reveals the delicate negotiations between tradition, desire, and identity, which resonated with all the jurors.”

The Main Prize Honourable Mentions were assigned to Godsips (The Serpent's Thread) by Emilia Martin, The Pregnant Tree by Gayatri Ganju, and Make Me Beautiful by Yufan Lu.

The €2,000 New Generation Prize was assigned to Indian photographer Niharika Chauhan who presented the project Time Is A River, here commented by judge Amak Mahmoodian:

"Through collages, photographs, and film, Niharika Chauhan's Time is A River traces the slow, uneven drift of time across Shahpur, the artist’s homeland. Niharika turns to four fragile witnesses, the crumbling ancestral home, the vanishing Sambar, the restlessly shifting Yamuna, and the memory of a grandfather, to reveal a village caught between what it has shed and what it has yet to become. Time is A River reveals a precision and emotional depth. It transforms personal memory into a wider meditation on ecology, inheritance, and the delicate space where the old dissolves and the new is still forming. Through this body of work, Niharika has crafted a vision of metamorphosis that feels at once intimate and universal".

¿Quieres Salvar Al Mundo? Empieza por tu Familia / Do You Want to Save the World? Start with Your Family by Jennifer Teresa Villanueva, The Stars That Don't Look Back by Léa Chen, and I'm Never Loved The Way I Do/You're Like Me Too by An Nguyen Nguyen Ngoc received the New Generation Prize Honourable Mentions.

Lisa Sorgini’s The Bushfire, the Flood was selected for a featured interview in Vogue Italia by Alessia Glaviano, Head of Global Photovogue.

I Still Do Not Know Him by Liying Huang, Horas mías (Hours of mine) by Justina Leston, Vanities by Najla Said, Look At Us Tenderly by Natalya Madilyan, Cuevas de Sacromonte by Perla Bayona and Chronicles of the Ongoing by Segolene Ragu will receive a free 60-minute online portfolio review with a mentor of their choice from the PhMuseum Education individual program.

All applications are still being considered for the solo exhibition at PhMuseum Lab, and features on PhMuseum's printed annual magazine. Artists whose work is selected will be contacted directly.

A big thank you to all participants, jurors and organisations who supported this 9th edition. The 31 shortlisted projects will be screened at Photo Vogue Festival 2026 and many of them will be featured on PhMuseum's online channels in the coming months. The grants program will return in January 2026 with the 14th edition of the PhMuseum Photography Grant. Meanwhile, enjoy all the selected and shortlisted projects at phmuseum.com/w25.