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.

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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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Tony Dočekal (1992, Amsterdam) is a photographer and visual artist whose work focuses on identity, belonging, and the shared human condition. Her practice is shaped by encounters with individuals and communities on the road, with a particular interest in the resilience and adaptability of people living on society’s margins. Her first monograph, The Color of Money and Trees, explores the tension between material success and deeper fulfillment, asking if true prosperity lies in community and self-awareness rather than wealth and possessions. The series includes Chad on Skid Row, which won the Zilveren Camera Portrait Award in 2021, and Lyric at El Pais, a portrait of a young girl living off the grid in Arizona. The work navigates the balance between societal expectations and individual freedom. Tony’s debut short film, Pearls on Credit, reflects on how personal identity is shaped by broader economic systems and societal expectations. Shown alongside an installation of The Color of Money and Trees at Biennale Images Vevey, it deepens Tony’s exploration of the pressures individuals face in navigating these structures. Tony holds a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from ArtEZ University of the Arts and has received recognition, including the Olympus Young Talent Award and De Burgemeester de Bruinprijs.

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Julius Thissen

Julius Thissen (1993, the Netherlands) lives and works in Arnhem, NL. Their work investigates themes of community and representation, masculinity, sports, and competition. Originating from their background as a performance artist, Thissen's photographic practice aims to create narratives that explore the fine line between performing and failing. These themes are closely tied to contemporary performance-driven culture and the influence of societal expectations on behavior. Their work is deeply rooted in personal experiences as a genderqueer and transmasculine individual. Thissen strongly opposes the restrictive and often binary narratives imposed on transgender and queer individuals.

Thissen has been nominated for the Hendrik Valk Prize, Arnhemse Nieuwe, and the Warsteiner Blooom Awards. In 2023, they received the Artist Basis Fund and, more recently, a Mondriaan Fund Artist Project Grant for their new project Bones of Graphene, Skin of Kevlar.

ROXANA RIOS *1994 (they/them) currently based in Leipzig, Germany. In 2017 Roxana picked up a double study at HGB Leipzig and AdBK Nuremberg and studied in the classes of Heidi Specker and Juergen Teller. After graduating in 2020 Roxana joined Isabel Lewis' class of the performing Arts.They received their Diploma in July 2023. Roxana's work has been shown at Museum Folkwang Essen, DEICHTORHALLEN Hamburg, Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig, Fotomuseum Winterthur and FOTOHOF Salzburg. Roxana was nominated for the Federal Prize for Art Students in 2020 and won the Contemporary German Photography Grant in 2024 Roxana's current practice engages in critical discussions concerning the development of (hegemonial) narratives, as well as the relations between image- and knowledge-production. Roxana examines ‘the’ body as a construct, material and representative within social orders.In this function, the work understands itself as an exercise in utopian thinking, seeing and speaking – a contribution to contemporary, social and aesthetic discourses.

Sarah Stone (U.K., 1994) is a photographer and artist based in Antwerp, Belgium. She received her master’s degree in photography at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp in 2022, winning the Photography Department prize. Her photographs have been published in .Tiff Magazine, Der Greif and Subbacultcha/Different Class and self-published books such as: 'La Vie De Camille' (2023), ‘ANNA’ (2022) and ‘The End of The Pipeline’ (2021). Her project '76 collages' was published by SO-RI in 2021 and a following series ‘98 collages’ is set to be published in 2025. In 2023 her image 'Whistle' from the project 'ANNA' was selected for ONBOARDSBiennale, an exhibition of art displayed on billboards throughout Antwerp. Her collage 'West Virginia Interior' was published in Karoo magazine in 2024. In 2024 Stone exhibited her work as part of the outside art trail "Out ofOffice" with BREEDBEELD in Gooik, Belgium and in 2023 with the FOMU(Photography Museum Antwerp) as part of .Tiff. Her collages were exhibited withStieglitz19 Gallery in the group show ‘Collage! Collage! Collage!’ with Vincent Delbrouck and Miriam Tolke (2021) as well as a pop-up in (2020). In 2025 she began her own TOT ZINES project, publishing local artists in the zine format. Stone’s work is created around a strong signature of aesthetic, poetic and colourful images, conveying a powerful message. This is substantiated by her usage of analog photography, creating imagery that presents an open and honest reflection of her surroundings, details, friends or objects that she is drawn to. Shot on 35mm film, they reveal her inner life at a certain time, almost like a distant diary. Stone's series are often founded on human traces, whether that be in personal relationships, or relationships to objects and materiality. Each with its own angle of approach, but based on the beauty of life and it's details. Her photographs illustrate and inspire people to embrace colour, texture, shape, and to see the world as a theatrical stage, full of props and characters. To capture the atmospheric variety of photographs, Stone uses various analogue cameras and experiments with making collages, using paint in her collages and works on paper.

Igor Shiller (1996) is a Serbia-born, Amsterdam-based visual artist who graduated with a degree in photography from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, in 2021. The following year, he was nominated for the FOAM Paul Huf Award. His work has been showcased at International Film Festival Rotterdam, Unfair Amsterdam and the EYE Film Museum, among others. In 2024, he received the Mangelos Award, honoring him as Serbia’s best young visual artist.Schiller’s artistic practice explores the lasting imprint of childhood, drawing inspiration from memories and his Balkan roots. Through photography, film, and set design, he transforms family archive into uncanny dreamscapes saturated with tenderness and warmth. Embracing play as both method and subject, he turns toys, lullabies, and games into historical artifacts that reveal how tradition and upbringing shape and perpetuate rigid systems. As colors grow richer and characters take form, the line between remembering and reinventing begins to blur. What started as a search for fragments of memory became an unfolding tale of identity and belonging.

Katerina Tsakiri was born in Athens in 1991 and she is based in Gothenburg, Sweden. She studied Photography and Audiovisual Arts in Athens and has an MFA in Photography from the University of Gothenburg. Since 2015 she has been working part-time as a visual artist and part-time as a commercial photographer. From 2019 she has been devoting her time to her artistic practice. She works with self-portraiture and her subjects are mainly autobiographical. The theme of her work is the female identity in Western culture with a focus on the female body. Her practice expands from staged photography to video performances and sculptures. In her latest project, she uses documentary photography to share the journey of her breast cancer treatment. She unravels through the photographic medium her body’s fragility and the impact of the illness on her female identity.

Pascual Ross (b.1977) is a Spanish photographer, who lives and works in Andalusia. His photographic practice is based on the people and the stories that each of us carry inside, this being his central axis of work. It reflects on the individual, his natural environment and the customs that condition him in one way or another. The minimal stories are the most important in the story line of your work.

Pierre Vanneste is a Belgian photographer and filmmaker based between Brussels and Dakar,specializing in long-term reportage and documentary projects. His work has been exhibited in museums and galleries (Biennale ofDakar Contemporary Art, Musée de la Photographie de Charleroi, FoMu,Zone i) and published in media outlets such as Médiapart,Libération, DOC! Photo Magazine, Courrier International (webversion), De Standaard, Tchak, Equal Times, and Alter Echo. In 2018, he co-directed "Bargny, the real face of economic emergence"a transmedia documentary (photos, videos, and texts) about thedesignation of land for industrial purposes. The project wasshortlisted for the Visa d'Or for Digital Information 2019 (Visa pourl'image festival). His project "DREMMWEL" (a photo project with enrichedvideo content) was published in 2020 by Éditions Yellow Now. It is along-term project on the extractivist model through fishing andoverfishing. This project has been exhibited in France, Belgium,Senegal, and Canada. One of the photographs from the project is nowpart of the permanent collection at the Musée de la Photographie deCharleroi. He received the 2019 Photographic Grant from the FondationJean-Luc Lagardère for his project "P2O5, the Toxic Impact ofPhosphate" which he co-directed with author-journalist Laurence Grun. Since 2022, he has been working on various videographic andphotographic documentary projects in Senegal.

Visual artist, burned-out climate activist, educator. Born in 1987 in Warsaw, Poland. Graduate of the University of Arts in Poznań , majoring in Photography. She heads the Second Studio of Photography (together with Dr. Mariusz Filipowicz) and the Studio of Photography Basics at the Faculty of Graphics of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. A member of the Pracownia Wschodnia Association, the Program Council of the Pracownia Wschodnia Gallery, and the P.H.U. Sitex collective. She is interested in grassroots practices of self-organisation and resistance. She navigates the conceptual realm that exists both within and beyond the binary oppositions foundational to the construction of Western civilization (‘culture versus nature’ and ‘art versus science’). She employs various strategies – visual art, academic research, activist experience – to transcend, deconstruct and rethink these binaries, bringing seemingly heterogeneous fi elds of knowledge to life. Although her practice is based on abstract ideas, the artist always remains close to material reality, focusing on ways of understanding (and feeling) how parts of the ecosystem live and die and how they affect each other.

Daria is a lens-based artist currently living and working between Kyiv and Paris. Originally from Odesa, Ukraine, Daria came to France to pursue an M.A. in Photography & Video at École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs of Paris, graduating in 2023.
In her artistic practice, Daria explores the connections between past and present, focusing primarily on the youth and cultural, social and political contexts in which young people live.
Her work was exhibited across Europe and the U.S., including La Villette (Paris), Open Eye Gallery (Liverpool), Hangar (Brussels), Mystetskiy Arsenal (Kyiv), The Gallery at
Dobbin Mews (New York). Daria is a finalist of the 39th Hyères festival (2024), Palm* Phot Prize (2022) and a recipient of Beyond the silence grant by Magnum Photos & Odesa Photo Days (2024), as well as a grant for contemporary documentary photography from CNAP.

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Emese Bíborka Szakács

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.

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Emese Mucsi

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).

Angel Luis Gonzalez Fernandez

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

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

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.

Iveta Gabalina

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.

Sebastian Vaida

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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