The
Professional
Iveta Gabalina
Lives and Works in
Riga
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.
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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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Catherine Lemblé (b. 1990) is a Belgian photographer based in Brussels. She received her MA in photography from Luca School of Arts Brussels. Her work has been exhibited at FOMU (Antwerp), De Brakke Grond (Amsterdam), Contretype (Brussels), Musée de la Photographie (Charleroi) and Helsinki Photo Festival, amongst others. She was selected for .tiff (FOMU, Antwerp) and FUTURES (European Photography Platform) in 2024. Her photographs have been featured in publications such as The New York Times, Stern, De Standaard, and Frankfurter Allgemeine Quarterly. Through analog pictures she examines the ever-changing relationship between humans and the more-than-human world.
Her second and most recent photo book, Only Barely Still – On Women and Wilderness, challenges conventional ideas about the Arctic and its collective imagination by focusing on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard and the lives of the women who inhabit it.



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

Paula Artés (1996) is an artist committed to unveiling and questioning hidden spaces
of power—and, by extension, control. Through rigorous prior research, she brings
these spaces to light.
Her work has been exhibited at Museu Habitat, curated by Manuel J. Borja-Villel;
Santa Mònica in Barcelona; Lo Pati in Amposta; the Museu Morera; and the Festival
de la Imagen in Colombia. She won the ArtNou Award for Best Exhibition at àngels
barcelona gallery.
Her work is part of the Mapfre Foundation collection and the Contemporary Art
Collection of the Generalitat de Catalunya. She has been selected for PhotoEspaña
Descubrimientos, Sala d’Art Jove, VEGAP, OSIC, and Unseen Amsterdam. She has
also been nominated for the Gabriele Basilico Prize, the C/O Berlin Talent Award, the
MAST Foundation Prize, and the Pla(t)form Prize at FotoMuseum. Additionally, she
has participated in residencies at HISK in Belgium and Baladre at Lo Pati.



He approached photography as a self-taught artist after earning a diploma in Graphic Design and Art Direction from NABA Milan in 2014.
In 2015, after spending one year in Tbilisi (Georgia) working on a documentary about Abkhazian refugees, he returned to Italy and joined the photography collective CESURA, where he remained for two years. During this time, he worked as an assistant to photographer Gabriele Micalizzi and collaborated with Alex Majoli (MAGNUM) on the production of several major exhibitions. While at CESURA, he shifted away from a photojournalistic approach, developing a long-term, research-driven photographic practice with a strong focus on photobooks.
After leaving the collective in 2017, he began working as a freelance photographer. His journey took him first to Siberia, where he worked on the project I Don’t Try to Feel Awake Anymore. In 2019, in Oklahoma, where a chance encounter with Kristal and her son Skyler led to Love Mom, an ongoing project that explores the sometimes toxic relationship between a mother and her son while also reflecting on emptiness and the profound solitude embedded in the vastness of the American suburbs.
In 2020, driven by the need to find a place to call home, he moved from Milan to a small village of 50 inhabitants in the Val di Noto. There, he began working on All These Goodbyes, a body of work that serves as both self-reflection and the story of an escape.
In the spring of 2021, he spent three months in Denmark collaborating with photographer Jacob Aue Sobol (MAGNUM) on the production of his book James House (2022).
In 2022, he was selected as one of the 25 winners of Italian Panorama, an open call organized by Vogue Italia and PhotoVogue.
In January 2023, the Penumbra Foundation (New York, USA) awarded him a full scholarship for its Long-Term Photobook Program.



Andong Zheng (1992, China) lives and works in Rotterdam, NL. With a hybrid background in engineering and fine art, Zheng was trained to focus on micro details within rigid causal frameworks, yet he often found himself questioning the macro structures they sustain. His work explores how seeing itself becomes a site of epistemological asymmetry. For him, image-making is less about mapping established knowledge systems than about dismantling and reconfiguring them, a way of engaging with the gaps, ambiguities, and contradictions that lie between these systems and the world. Through this practice, he seeks to open up new ways of knowing that traverse rationality.
Zheng was shortlisted for the Jimei x Arles Discovery Award (2024) and musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac Photography Award (2025). His work has also been featured in publications such as The Routledge Companion to Photography, Representation and Social Justice, British Journal of Photography, and Chinese Photography.
Zheng was shortlisted for the Jimei x Arles Discovery Award (2024) and musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac Photography Award (2025). His work has also been featured in publications such as The Routledge Companion to Photography, Representation and Social Justice, British Journal of Photography, and Chinese Photography.

Parisa Aminolahi (Tehran, Iran), based in the Netherlands, is a freelance filmmaker and photographer. Her series are mostly long-term projects. And her work explores themes such as displacement, exile, homeland, family, and childhood memories, using old family photographs, self-portraits, and her own family members as subjects. Her mediums include photography, documentary filmmaking, animation, painting, and mixed media.She studied theatre stage design (BA) and animation (MA) at University of Art in Tehran and documentary filmmaking (MA) at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is a recipient of The Firecracker Photographic Grant, The Netherlands Film Fund, GUP New Dutch Photography Talent of the Year and One World Media Student Film Bursary. Her dummy book, Tehran Diary, was shortlisted for the MACK First Book Award, BUP Book Award, and PHmuseum Women Photographers Grant. She has held screenings and exhibitions locally and internationally and is represented by Ag Galerie.



Ilias Lois (b. Athens) is an artist whose work considers the notion of home, life in European urban centers, and the materiality of objects and technologies. His practice pays particular attention to the act of translating the three-dimensional world into two-dimensional surfaces—and the reverse process that may follow. He is especially drawn to photographic sequencing and the possibilities of non-linear storytelling. In the summer of 2024, he earned a Master’s degree in Photography: Research and Methodology from UniWA. He contributes to photography education as a tutor at the Hellenic Centre of Photography and Paper Drop Lab (founder), where he leads project development and experimental curation workshops. He is also an editor at Velvet Eyes, an online photography magazine. On the recommendation of the publishing house Void, he became Future Talent ’24.

Nayara Leite (b. 1989) is a Brazilian artist and writer based in Bergen, Norway. She holds an MFA from the Bergen Art Academy and an MA in Photojournalism & Documentary Photography from the London College of Communication. Nayara works across text, performance, film, photography and installation. Through autobiographical narrative, political news, archival material and letters to close friends, she produces a portrayal of the reality in which the LGBTQ+ community lives in Brazil and in Norway. She has exhibited and/or held performances at Bergen Kunsthall, Palmera, Lydgalleriet, Isotop, Bergen Kjøtt and KODE 2 in Bergen; Preus Museum in Horten; Studio 17 in Stavanger; Oslo Negativ, Kunstnerforbundet and Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo; and Momentum Biennale in Moss.

Toma Hurduc is a documentary photographer, currently working in Bucharest. His attention was first focused on representing local underground communities and movements, which he strongly feels related to. Nowadays, his narratives are often built on top of the personal experience and relationship with the subject matter, therefore the factual truth is often mixed with the meta, imaginative truth, aiming to question the human perception of reality, dread, anxiety, ephemerality and the construction of memory.
Having an academic background in Cinematography, Toma is highly interested in the way light forms images, choosing to work regularly on 35mm black and white film, as a way to render the surreal he sees in ordinary life.
Toma’s work has been exhibited both collectively and solo in Romania and abroad and he has been part of multiple mentorship programs, most recent being with Annie Leibovitz and IKEA.



Helena Kalleitner (*1996) lives and works as a freelance photographer in Salzburg. In 2021, she graduated from the College for Photography and Audiovisual Media at Die Graphische Wien, followed by the Friedl Kubelka School for Artistic Photography, where she graduated in 2022. Beside her personal projects, she works in the fields of editorial, portrait, and documentary photography.
She has been part of FOTOHOF Salzburg since 2022.
Her approach focuses strongly on immersing herself in different realities through the medium of photography. Starting from a critical but curious basis of observation, she often deals with social issues and phenomena.


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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.

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.

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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