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2025 Joop Swart Masterclass

2025 Joop Swart Masterclass participants announced

For the second year in a row, the Joop Swart Masterclass will continue to focus on the MENA region, thanks to funding from the Porticus Foundation.

While holding on to the core objective to develop and guide photographers with 5-10 years of experience in their practice, the renewed format of the Joop Swart Masterclass places special emphasis on building skills for long and sustainable careers in photojournalism, documentary photography, and beyond.

Participants

Presenting the 13 participants for the 2025 Joop Swart Masterclass, selected from over 200 nominated photographers by an independent selection committee:

  • Ameen Abo Kaseem

    Ameen Abo Kaseem is a Beirut based Palestinian-Syrian documentary photographer and filmmaker. His work explores personal surroundings and survival amidst societal challenges and unstable environments.

  • Amina Kadous

    Amina Kadous is a Cairo-based visual artist whose work explores the concepts of memory and identity, examining how both are defined and redefined over time and space.

  • Andrés Pérez

    Andrés Pérez, a queer Venezuelan photographer and visual artist based in Bogotá, blends artistic and documentary photography to explore identity, memory, binary violence, and aesthetics of control.

  • Chiara Wettmann

    Chiara Wettmann is a documentary photographer based between Berlin and Beirut. Her work investigates the intersections of human rights, power structures, and historical legacies.

  • Gabriel Ferneini

    Gabriel Ferneini is a photographer based in Beirut. His work questions systemic and self-imposed borders and the role of images in constructing or dismantling them.

  • Imane Djamil

    Imane Djamil is a Morocco-based visual storyteller. She engages viewers in photographic projects imbued with the style of docudramas. Her works straddle the realistic and phantasmagoric.

  • Luis Antonio Rojas

    Luis Antonio Rojas is an independent photographer and editor based in Mexico City who works on personal documentary projects and commissions for publications, non-profits and corporate clients.

  • Maen Hammad

    Maen Hammad, a Palestinian documentary photographer and writer who was raised in the US, and is now based in Ramallah, explores the imaginative and finds creativity in the mundane.

  • Masoumeh Bahrami

    Masoumeh Bahrami is an Iranian artist and photographer. Her work is rooted in investigations of gender, memory, and environmental change, navigating between personal history and collective trauma.

  • Natthaya Thaidecha

    Natthaya Thaidecha, a Bangkok-based photographer, uses personal experience to explore grief, belief, and the lasting impact of socio-political power structures in her work.

  • Saher Alghorra

    Saher Alghorra is a photojournalist based in the Gaza Strip, Palestine, who collaborates with international agencies and institutions. He actively covers events in the Gaza Strip.

  • Sumi Anjuman

    Sumi Anjuman, a photographer in based Dhaka, uses her work as resistance—amplifying silenced voices, celebrating defiance, and protesting gender-based violence through nonviolent visual storytelling.

  • Thero Makepe

    Thero Makepe, an artist working across Gaborone, Cape Town, and Johannesburg, uses photography to explore personal and social narratives from his upbringing in Botswana and South Africa.

Selection committee

The 13 participants were selected by an independent selection committee based on a nomination process. The selection committee for this year was:

  • Abdo Shanan, Algeria, documentary photographer
  • Stella Nantongo, Uganda, co-director at FOTEA and organiser of the Uganda Press Photo Award
  • Sana Ullah, United States/Bangladesh, Senior Program Officer (Storytelling), National Geographic Society
  • Daniel Boetker-Smith, Australia, educator, writer, curator, publisher, and photographer
  • Luisa Fernanda González, Colombia, photojournalist and photo editor, Reuters

Program

The 2025 Joop Swart Masterclass program will consist of three components:

  • Online mentorship from 24 June to 27 October 2025. Participants will work on a personal project, receive feedback from the mentors and fellow mentees, and participate in online presentations.
  • In-person masterclass from 2-8 November 2025. The group will come together in Amsterdam for an intensive week of workshops, visits, talks, and a public presentation where they will share their work in progress with our audience.
  • Post-masterclass presentations in November-December 2025. After the masterclass, participants will share their learnings from the program with their local photography communities.

Mentors

The participants will work on their projects under the guidance of four mentors. The 2025 Joop Swart Masterclass mentors will be announced soon.
See the alumni
Joop Swart Masterclass 1994-2025

See the alumni

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