Amira’s Castle explores the lives of Maen’s grandparents, Amira and Mohammad, who, through exile and return, embody the fractured aspirations of Palestinian freedom. By putting his grandmother’s daily practices on the land in dialogue with his grandfather’s revolutionary past preserved in a vast archive, this project seeks to understand how the hopes and sacrifices they carried can shape a vision for Palestinian freedom today. It is both an expansion of a living archive and a tribute to a lifetime of displacement, love, and reclamation, while offering a compass for his own journey as a grandson choosing return against a backdrop of genocide.
Maen Hammad (Palestine) is a documentary photographer and writer who was raised in the United States and is now based in Ramallah. In his work, he explores the imaginative and finds creativity in the mundane.
Since June, the 2025 Joop Swart Masterclass participants have been working on their projects under the guidance of their mentors and participating in online thematic presentations by a lineup of industry professionals. In November, the group will come together in Amsterdam for an intensive week of workshops, visits, talks, and the final project presentations, where the 13 photographers will share their work in progress with the public during a special event.
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 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, 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 is a documentary photographer based between Berlin and Beirut. Her work investigates the intersections of human rights, power structures, and historical legacies.
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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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, a photographer based in Dhaka, uses her work as resistance—amplifying silenced voices, celebrating defiance, and protesting gender-based violence through nonviolent visual storytelling.
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.
