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Danaé Panchaud is a Swiss exhibition curator, museologist and lecturer specialising in photography. She has been the director of the Centre de la photographie Genève since 2022, after serving from 2018 to 2021 as director and curator of the Photoforum Pasquart in Biel, Switzerland. She trained in photography at the Vevey School of Photography before completing a bachelor’s degree in visual arts with a specialisation in curatorial practices at Geneva University of Art and Design. She later studied museology at Birkbeck, University of London, earning a master’s degree in 2017. She has held positions in several Swiss institutions in the fields of contemporary art, design and science, including the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, where she was a research associate from 2007 to 2012, the Gallery SAKS in Geneva in 2012-2013, the Fondation Verdan in Lausanne as scientific collaborator, and the mudac in Lausanne, where she was in charge of the public relations from 2012 to 2017. As a free-lance curator, she has curated exhibitions for several Swiss and international museums, independent spaces and galleries since 2012. She regularly writes texts for monographs of contemporary artists, exhibition catalogues, and thematic publications such as Flora Photographica, co-authored with William Ewing and published by Thames & Hudson in 2022. She was a lecturer at the Vevey School of Photography from 2014 to 2018, and regularly lectures at art and photography schools in Switzerland. In 2023, she joined the teaching faculty of the CAS in Theory and History of Photography at University of Zurich.
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Each year every member of the FUTURES European Photography Platform nominates a set of artists and projects to become part of the FUTURES network.
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The work of Maite Vanhellemont (1990) moves at the intersection of family stories and collective history. In “A Little Memory of The Beginning”, she reflects on her Dutch-Indonesian background using archive material, photography, video, drawings and text. In May 2026 she will present this project in a solo exhibition during Kraków Photo Month (PL). In collaboration with FW:Books (NL), she will present a publication at the end of 2026.
In 2025, she was selected for the FOTODOK Talent Embassy, and in 2024, the project “Zoals mij gewoon is” (As as is common to me) was presented during SPOOR Art Festival (BE), in collaboration with Plan B Arts Platform.
She is also a lecturer at the University of the Arts in Utrecht (NL), a language volunteer for women at Stichting Dynamo in Amsterdam (NL) and is currently enrolled in the part-time master's program “Education in Arts” at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam (NL).
In 2025, she was selected for the FOTODOK Talent Embassy, and in 2024, the project “Zoals mij gewoon is” (As as is common to me) was presented during SPOOR Art Festival (BE), in collaboration with Plan B Arts Platform.
She is also a lecturer at the University of the Arts in Utrecht (NL), a language volunteer for women at Stichting Dynamo in Amsterdam (NL) and is currently enrolled in the part-time master's program “Education in Arts” at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam (NL).



Angeniet Berkers (1985) is a documentary photographer and educator based in Rotterdam. She holds a BA Degree in Social Work and Photography (KABK The Hague). She previously worked as a sociotherapist, counseling veterans and refugees with complex PTSD. Her background in mental health care is evident in her choice of subjects, approach, and working methods.
Her long-term projects explore the intersections of history, trauma, and family, revealing how personal and collective memories shape and influence our present. Through extensive research and a blend of visual languages, archival materials, text, and sound, she translates complex stories into an accessible and empathetic whole.
Her project Lebensborn was shortlisted for the Aperture Paris Photo First Book Award and the Historical Book Award at Luma Rencontres d'Arles. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Katalog Journal, de Volkskrant, and NRC.



Laurence Rasti was born in 1990 to Iranian parents in Switzerland. She studied photography at ECAL – University of Art and Design Lausanne (BA, 2014) and fine arts at HEAD – Geneva University of Art and Design (MA, 2019). Her projects often explore issues surrounding identity, visibility, legitimacy and representation. Drawing from the duality of her own cultural background, she examines Swiss and Iranian cultural codes and conventions in order to understand the influence of gender roles in society. The consequences of migration or the non-respect of fundamental rights is another strong focus of many of her recent projects.
Her book "There Are No Homosexuals in Iran" (Edition Patrick Frey, 2017) was shortlisted for the Paris Photo Aperture First Photobook Award, the Author Book Award of Rencontres d’Arles, and nominated as one of the 10 best photobooks of 2017 by the New York Times Magazine. Her work has been exhibited in group and solo exhibitions around the world, including "ReGeneration3" at Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, "Disruptive Perspectives" at Museum of Contemporary in Chicago and Photoforum Pasquart in Biel, "Iran Contemporary" at Fotohof Art Gallery in Austria, and several festivals including PhotoKatmandu, Athens Photo Festival and Tokyo International Photography Festival. She was the laureate of the Photographic Survey of the City of Geneva in 2019, and of the Photographic Survey of Canton Neuchâtel in 2022.



Karol Szymkowiak (b. 1983) is a photographer, photobook artist, curator and educator based in Poznań, Poland. Self-taught photographer, specializing in documentary photography and photo collages - work with archives. His work revolves around themes such as environmental problems, military and civil defence, physical and mental immobilisation. He is constantly fascinated by finding surrealism in faithfully recording reality using photography. As a photographer, he has participated in over a dozen group exhibitions. Since 2015 he is art curator of a long-term photography documentary project The Września Collection (Kolekcja Wrzesińska) whose patron is the Mayor of the City and Municipality of Września. As part of his work on this project, he is collaborating with leading Polish photographers to create photobooks and exhibitions about his home town of Września. Karol is a member of The Association of Polish Art Photographers (ZPAF) and a scholarship recipient of the Marshal of the Wielkopolska Region in the field of culture. He is also a lecturer in photography at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw.



Emilia Martin is a Polish artist and photographer based in The Hague, Netherlands, where in 2022 she graduated from Photography & Society Masters at the Royal Academy of the Art. Working with photography, writing, and sound, she explores how the stories we tell shape the realities we inhabit. She investigates mythologies and tales, and how they fluctuate and shift throughout histories. Through her work, she aims to complicate the binary understandings of fiction and truth and their established aesthetics. Her process is based on careful research and personal, often playful approaches, through which she questions dominant narratives.
The belief in storytelling is rooted in her upbringing, where she engaged with both rural mythologies and urban narratives. She grew up between two different realities: a remote farm belonging to her grandmother in rural Eastern Poland and a heavy industry coal mining urban region in the West of the country. The clash between these two realities, the narrative of extractivism against rural mythologies and the proximity of nature, formed a place that continues to ground her artistic practice. Her work is inspired and informed by her rural Polish ancestry and intersectional feminist approaches.



Karolina Gembara is a photographer and researcher whose work revolves around themes such as home, belonging, migration, and practices of care. Much of her recent activity has been devoted to politics and activism. She uses photography and video as tools and pretexts for collaboration, fostering creative processes. In 2013, she published her debut book "Fitting Rooms," which examines the role of women in her generation. Between 2009 and 2016, Karolina was based in India, where she produced her second book "When We Lie Down, Grasses Grow From Us," exploring the migratory experience (published by GOST Books in 2019). She is an editor of several Strike Newspapers published by the Archive of Public Protest. In recent years, she has initiated and completed several participatory projects involving refugees, creating spaces for collaboration and self-expression. Karolina is currently working on her Ph.D. dissertation (K. Kieślowski Film School), which centers around the subjective narratives of historical migrations. She is a member of Sputnik Photos and the A-P-P

Kristīne Krauze-Slucka is a visual artist based in Riga, Latvia, whose conceptual practice interrogates the materiality of industrially produced objects, transforming them into catalysts for pseudo-social anthropological inquiries that unravel conventional perceptions.
Her approach to photographic image-making transcends the traditional lens, venturing into the realm of meta images and afterimages. By employing experimental, camera-less techniques, she treats the photographic medium not only as a tool for visual representation but as a tactile, sensory and embodied experience that underscores the physical and material processes of creation.
Balancing familiarity with abstraction, her work invites viewers to reconsider the often distorted relationships between man-made materials and the environment, ultimately engaging a sensory dialogue about our perception.
Krauze-Slucka holds a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from the Visual Communication Department of the Latvian Academy of Arts. She was awarded the Grand Prix of the Nordic and Baltic Young Artist Award in 2020 and has been twice nominated for the prestigious Purvītis Prize.
In 2022, she was selected as a FUTURES artist, an honor awarded by the Europe-based photography platform. She also serves as a lecturer at the International Summer School of Photography (ISSP).



Teresa Freitas (b. 1990) is a Portuguese photographer and colourist. Her work navigates the genres of fine art, documentary and street photography, often exploring the impact of colour in composition, place, mood, and in the viewer's aesthetic response.
Initially drawn to black and white film, Teresa followed her influences from Painting and Cinema to apply a knowledge of colour theory and harmony to develop a signature style which has earned her praise in many publications. She shares this knowledge through international workshops and online courses.
After several years working in commercial photography—with collaborations including Leica, Adobe, and Dior—she is now focused on short and long-term documentary projects. Her current work examines cultural and symbolic relationships to nature, particularly through flowers.

Jeroen De Wandel uses photography as a starting point to create new images from all sorts of material (photographic or otherwise), using his own photography in different shapes, contexts and meanings.
His artistic work often starts from a personal need to react within a social context / our society. A common thread is the functioning of our brain: how we deal with zeitgeist, with information, with manipulation, with technology and how all this reflects back on our psychological well-being.
Depending on the angle and location, he uses different techniques, from photography and collages to installations, sculptures and spatial interventions. He showed work in FoMu (BE) and Circulations (FR) and recently had his first solo show (2024).
Follow at @jeroen_de_wandel for recent work



Benedetta Casagrande is an artist, writer and educator working with photography. Starting from a theoretical approach in the field of ecology and critical studies, she developed a biocentric practice that uses photography to investigate interspecies relationships and more-than-human life in times of extinctions.
Benedetta is the winner of the Luigi Ghirri Prize (2024), of FE+SK Book Award (2024), and received the honorable mention from the jury of the Francesco Fabbri Prize for Contemporary Arts (2024). She is the commissioned artist for Photo Città della Pieve 2025. Her first photobook, All things laid dormant (Skinnerboox, 2024) was shortlisted for the Arles Authors Book Award and Singapore International Photography Festival Book Award, and received the special mention of the Marco Bastianelli Book Award (2025). Her work has been exhibited in national and international exhibitions, including Triennale Milano (Milan, 2025), Italian Institute of Culture Stockholm (2025), L'Imagerie Centre d'Arte (Lainnon, 2025), Prague Photo Festival (2025), Ph Museum Days (Bologna, 2024), Fotografia Europea, Palazzo dei Musei (Reggio Emilia, 2024), Photo Brussels Festival (2024), ADI Design Museum (Milano, 2023), INSTANCE (Shanghai, 2021) and Photo Ireland Festival (2019). Her writing has been published on digital and print publications such as American Suburb X, inCf Magazine, The Light Observer, Ardesia Projects and Over Journal, and she has written essays for photobooks and catalogues amongst which Lay Her Down Upon Her Back (Róisín White, 2023), How To Raise a Hand (Angelo Vignali, 2022), ITALIA 90 (2021) and Diachronicles (CameraWork, Giulia Parlato, 2020).


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Emese Bíborka Szakács studied at the Institute of Communication and Media Studies at Pázmány Péter Catholic University. She is currently pursuing a degree in Art History at the University of Pécs.
Her interests focus on the past and present of experimental photography, as well as the cultural role of new media. As a staff member of the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, she is involved in organizing international exhibitions and professional programs. She also works as a curator and writer within the frameworks of the Studio of Young Photographers (FFS) and the Studio of Young Artists’ Association (FKSE), contributing to the professional development and realization of several exhibitions in recent years.

Salvatore Vitale (b. 1986, Palermo, Italy) is a Swiss-based artist, director, and professor whose work explores the complexity of contemporary societies. Using expanded and speculative storytelling through mixed media techniques, he focuses on the politics of systems that regulate modernity and the impact of technological transformations.
Vitale is the Artistic Director of EXPOSED Torino Foto Festival and FUTURES Photography, both international platforms dedicated to contemporary photography. He also serves as a Professor at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, where he leads the Transmedia Storytelling Programme. Previously, he was the co-founder and editor-in-chief of YET magazine, an international photography publication.
Vitale’s work has received international awards. It is featured in several public and private collections and has been widely exhibited in museums and at festivals worldwide.

Emese Mucsi is a Hungarian-born curator, and art critic. Emese curates exhibitions where photography is interpreted in the context of contemporary art and works with artists who have an expanded idea of photography and produce photo-based works. Her projects bring together artists and photographers with photojournalists, writers, editors, and other thinkers to experiment with new approaches to photography. She graduated from the Faculty of Contemporary Art Theory and Curatorial Studies at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 2013, and from the Faculty of Hungarian Literature and Linguistics at the University of Szeged in 2017. She is a member of the curators’ collective BÜRO imaginaire since 2012. Since 2013, she ran projects as a freelance curator. From 2014 to 2018, she was the Editor-in-Chief of Artmagazin Online. Emese is a curator of the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest since 2018. She is the member of Global Photographies Network since 2020. She founded DOXA exhibition space and editorial den in 2022. She is doing her PhD in the Film, Media, and Contemporary Culture PhD program at Eötvös Loránd University. Emese is a guest lecturer at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (2023) and the University of Szeged (2024).

Ángel Luis González Fernández is a designer, artist, and curator supporting engaging visual arts practices, winner of Business to Arts David Manley Emerging Entrepreneur Awards 2011.
His work manifests through PhotoIreland, which he founded in 2010 to stimulate a critical dialogue on Photography. He devises curatorial projects placing conversations in the public realm around visual culture, critical thinking. These include events (PhotoIreland Festival, Halftone Print Fair, arts residency How to Flatten a Mountain, and New Irish Works), a cultural hub (The Library Project: Ireland’s Art bookshop, host to a unique resource library of photobooks and a productive arts programme), publishing projects that distribute inexpensive access to local practices, research projects (Critical Academy: examining contemporary art practices). He works collaboratively with a growing network of organisations, noticeably through ambitious Creative Europe partnerships.
During the Summer 2020 lockdown he launched the critical publication OVER Journal, now distributed globally. He received the Arts Council of Ireland’s Visual Arts Bursary to deepen research on the broad historical and specific artistic context of Photography in Ireland, to curate an ambitious survey exhibition in PhotoIreland Festival 2022 and to publish a series of publications on the matter. He regularly contributes to publications such as the forthcoming The Routledge Companion to Global Photographies, edited by Lucy Soutter, Duncan Wooldridge.
See some of his Graphic and Web Design work in the 100 Design Archive.

Julia Gelezova is a Cultural Producer and Curator, specialising in contemporary lens-based practices. She is General and Project Manager for PhotoIreland, producing events throughout the year like the annual PhotoIreland Festival and Critical Academy, while collaborating on ambitious projects like Creative Europe Photography Platforms—Parallel and Futures. Julia is co-editor of OVER Journal: The Critical Journal of Photography and Visual Culture for the 21st Century. In 2024, she has founded vicinities.network - a peer network for Visual Arts curators and professionals based in Ireland.
She has ample experience in producing exhibitions and events, including curatorial work and project management, has vast and successful experience in personal and collective application writing for bodies like the Arts Council of Ireland and local councils. She has participated in portfolio reviews, acted as visiting lecturer, and also worked in an editorial capacity and translation for artists and other arts professionals, including work for The Routledge Guide to Photography and Visual Culture. Most recently, she curated the 2021 edition of PhotoIreland Festival and was the Centre Culturel Irlandais cultural producer resident 2022. She is a member of the AICA International Association of Art Critics.

Iveta Gabaliņa (1979) is a curator, artist and educator. She has studied photography at the studio of Andrejs Grants, at Bournemouth Art Institute, and in the MA programme at Alto University in Helsinki. Her work has been exhibited in Latvia and internationally, including at C/O (Berlin, Germany), GESTE (Paris), and Williams Tower Gallery (Houston, USA). Gabaliņa has participated in photography festivals in Singapore, Hanover, and elsewhere. Her work is included in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, Geste Paris, and the Deutsche Börse Art Collection.
Since 2008 she has been part of ISSP team, responsible for numerous educational and curatorial projects. In 2018 she founded ISSP Gallery - an exhibition space dedicated to contemporary photography.

I’ve always loved photography, even if it sounds like a cliche. The first photos I took, I did without knowing how to do that, without paying any attention to framing, subject or composition. After a while, I began to understand what is happening in the space between me as a photographer and the subject I was photographing. And many years later, I also understood why I love to photograph. To communicate. A message, a concept, an emotion.
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