Donna Ferrato, b. 1949, Waltham, MA

Ferrato is an independent photojournalist and activist who has illuminated the diverse experiences of women for over 50 years. By capturing the extremes—trust and trauma, pain and pleasure, life and death—her body of work tells a story much greater than the sum of its parts.

Through her camera, Ferrato has always been on a mission to change social attitudes and unjust judgements. Ferrato first received critical recognition for her work about the horrors of domestic violence in her book, Living with the Enemy, published by Aperture in 1991. Living with the Enemy inspired Joe Biden when he was a senator to pass the Violence Against Women Act. Since then, she has continued to tell the stories of survivors of domestic violence, while using her lens to celebrate the full circle of women's lives. Her book, Holy, won the 2021 Lucie Foundation Photobook Award for Best Independent, Single Author Photo Book.

Other awards include the W. Eugene Smith Grant (1986), Robert F. Kennedy Award for Humanistic Photography (1987), the Kodak Crystal

Eagle for Courage in Journalism (1997), and most recently, a public art grant from the NYC Mayor’s Office to create awareness about gender-based violence, The Wall of Silence, at the Collect Pond Park.

Ferrato founded a non-profit called Domestic Abuse Awareness, and in 2014 launched a campaign called I Am Unbeatable which features women who have left their abusers. In 2016, TIME magazine announced her photograph of a woman being hit by her husband (1982) as one of the “100 Most Influential Photographs of All Time.” She is based in New York City, still fighting for women’s rights.

In 2020, Ferrato was included as one of the Hundred Heroines by the British Arts foundation, Hundred Heroines.

As a documentary and portrait photographer, Laylah Amatullah Barrayn focuses her inquiries on the cultures and identities within the global Black diaspora with a special interest in memory and the lived experiences of women. Her practice, spanning 20 years, includes exhibition organizing and essay writing. She is frequently on assignment for The New York Times and has been commissioned by The Guardian, Le Monde, National Geographic, NPR, Vogue and The New Yorker.

Barrayn’s monograph, We Are Present: 2020 in Portraits, was published with the support of Magnum Foundation. She is also co-author of MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora, the first anthology in nearly 30 years that highlights photography produced by women of African descent. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and she is a recipient of numerous grants. Barrayn is currently completing a book on contemporary Black photographers. She holds a M.A. from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Meryl Meisler was born in 1951 into a Jewish family and grew up on Long Island, New York. She began photography in the 1970s, inspired by her dad's family photos, Diane Arbus and Jacques Henri Lartigue. In 1975, Meryl moved to New York City, studied with Lisette Model, and worked as a freelance illustrator. In those years, she assiduously frequented Manhattan nightclubs, where she witnessed the disco explosion. During these wild evenings, she danced and photographed the city's nightlife.

In 1979, she became an art teacher in the NYC Public Schools, where she photographed street life in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and other neighborhoods she taught. Throughout the years, Meryl Meisler also documented the lives of those closest to her at family dinners and festive gatherings.

After retiring from the public schools, Meryl began releasing and promoting her decades of unseen work. She published her first monograph in 2014, A Tale of Two Cities: Disco Era Bushwick (ed. Bizarre), followed by Purgatory & Paradise SASSY '70s Suburbia & The City (Bizarre 2015) and New York PARADISE LOST Bushwick Era Disco (Parallel Pictures Press, 2021). Meryl lives and works in Woodstock and NYC, continuing her photographic memoir begun in 1973 – sweet and sassy, with a pinch of mystery.. CLAMP and Polka Galerie represent her work.

Florence “Flo” Ngala is an editorial photographer known for her celebrity portraits and photojournalism of various hip hop artists. She is a New York native and first-generation American who credits Harlem and her parents for a love of creative hustle. She discovered photography in middle school as a student and went on to major in Advertising/Public Relations and minor in Digital Design at The City College of New York.

Flo’s work has appeared on The New York Times, Billboard and Essence covers, she is also known for portraits of musical talent such as Cardi B, Method Man and Burna Boy, and others. In 2022, Flo became the first Black woman invited by Vogue to photograph at the MET Gala. Later that year, she was listed as a 2023 Forbes 30 Under 30 recipient in the Art & Style category.

Flo is currently based in Miami, Florida and grew up in New York City.

(Photo credit- Denzel Golatt/ The CCNYC)

Graciela Magnoni was born in Montevideo, Uruguay to French and Uruguayan parents. She

spent her childhood and teen years moving between South America and Europe. For a period of

10 years, she was a press photographer in Latin America and during this period she covered the

democratization of many countries in the region. In 2003 she moved to Singapore and started

working on personal projects.

Travelling and photographing on the streets has been a strong interest since Graciela was 17

years old. Her approach is capturing candid moments on the streets of the world. In her words,

“There are moments when a scene is transformed by the camera into an image with a story to

tell. “

She has just published a book called Watan based on 6 years of exploring the Punjab region

from both sides of the Indo-Pak border. She is currently working on a project called Nosotras,

which is about women and girls around the world. The project was shortlisted for the prestigious

LOBA award in Germany in 2021.

Graciela has a BA in Journalism from the PUC University of São Paulo in Brazil and a Master

Degree in Visual and International Communication from the University of Minnesota in USA.

Tracey Woods is the Director of Photography at The Luupe and a freelance creative consultant and producer. Prior to this, she was the photo director at Essence Communications. Tracey has produced editorial and commercial content for a variety of well-known brands, participated in panels, and sat on juries for some of the top photography organizations around the globe. As an artist and photographer, Tracey’s signature artwork adorned the windows of Macy’s flagship stores in New York, San Francisco and Chicago during summer 2020. Woods holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in photography from Pratt Institute and earned her Bachelor of Arts in graphic design from Rhode Island College.

Debra Klomp Ching is the co-owner of the Klompching Gallery (est. 2007) in Brooklyn, New York. The gallery specializes in the exhibition and sale of contemporary fine art photographs. Artworks by its international roster of artists can be found in the collections of MoCP, George Eastman Museum, LACMA, MOMA and Victoria & Albert Museum among many others. In addition to owning and operating the gallery, she is a freelance consultant, writer, curator and educator. Her writing has been published in several publications, including being a guest editor for Photography Quarterly (issue No. 99) and the commissioning editor/publisher of (re)collect – Jonathan Shaw (2006). She is a regular judge for photography awards, including the LensCulture Emerging Talent Award (2017), San Francisco Bay International Photography Show(2018), and the Arnold Newman Portrait Award (2018). Debra Klomp Ching is also an Adjunct Faculty member at the School of Visual Arts (SVA), the co-founder of the Fresh Annual Photography Exhibition and the Rhonda Wilson Award.

IG: @debraklompching @klompchinggallery

Debrani Das is a Kolkata based street photographer , X Ambassador Fujifilm India, winner of the Women Street Photographers Artist Residency 2020 in NYC and co-founder of Unexposed Southasia. She is the co-curator of an exhibition of Indian female street photographers by Women Street Photographers at the prestigious Indian Photo Festival IPF 2022 .

Her photographs have been exhibited nationally and internationally. Her works have been part of many prestigious books and magazines like Women Street Photographer, Reclaim The Street , FujiLove Magazine, Street Sweeper Magazine , Eyeshot magazine etc.

Lauren is a freelance photographer and former corporate attorney who left an unfulfilling, 16-year career, to follow her passion for photography. She also serves as a photography instructor for Leica Akademie USA and for NYC Salt, a non-profit photography program for high school students from underserved communities in New York City. Attracted to ideas and stories that display our commonalities as people, Lauren believes that as human beings we are much more alike than we are different. One of her greatest joys is to make candid photographs of people, in which a single frame can tell a multitude stories.

Lauren's photography has received several awards and has been exhibited at various venues around the world, including: "The Fence" at Photoville, the Museum of the City of New York, The Half King Photo Series, in New York City; HeadOn Photo Festival, Sydney, Australia; and Gudberg Nerger Gallery, Hamburg, Germany. Her work and interviews have been published in various publications, including the New York Times; La Repubblica, CBS News, The New Yorker and various street photography books.

www.laurenwelles.com

@laurenwelles

Sonia Goydenko is an award-winning, internationally exhibited street photographer and educator. She has been published in Huffington Post, Eyeshot Magazine, the Women Street Photographers book, The Pictorialist, and various other mediums. In addition to photographing daily, she has worked at the International Center of Photography and guest lectured at the School of Visual Arts. She is a member of New York City Street Photography Collective (NYC-SPC) through which she teaches photo workshops as well as offering online Zoom classes and private portfolio reviews. She currently resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she continues teaching photography, creating photo-books, and immersing herself in the bizarre, creative medium that is photography.

Sandra Hernández (Vita Flumen), is a Mexican-Canadian photographer and a Fujifilm ambassador (X-Photographer) based in Mexico. With a prolific career in architecture before pursuing photography, Sandra focuses on the visual rhetoric of everyday life and the stories that arise there.

Her passion for these themes has fueled accomplishments such as creating the first book focusing on street photography in Mexico’s history, Antología de fotografía de calle mexicana. She’s also founder of Urban Observers: a platform dedicated to spreading and promoting Ibero-American street photography. She’s a member of Women Street Photographers, Women Photograph, pro member of The Raw Society and last year she’s been selected for the class of 2023 of The Eddie Adams Workshop.

Sandra’s work, both photographs and text, has been published and featured locally and internationally in outlets such as L’oeil de la photographie, La Vanguardia, Revista Cuartoscuro, Revista Gatopardo, Eyeshot, Women Photograph: Year in Pictures, and Revue Épic. She’s also participated in various solo and group exhibitions on four continents and has received awards and honorable mentions in global photography competitions. Since 2017, Sandra has been the official photographer for Mexico’s legendary Carrera Panamericana rally.

Nina Welch-Kling is a New York City-based photographer. The German native combines her background in architecture and design with her passion for roaming the city streets to guide her often mysterious photographic depictions of everyday life. Welch-Kling earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a focus in Interior Design from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1990 and a Master in Architecture from The University of California, Los Angeles in 1993.

In 2020, Welch-Kling was a recipient of the LensCulture Critics’ Choice Award as well as a finalist in the LensCulture Street Photography Awards. Welch-Kling's work has been included in multiple international photography exhibitions as well as numerous magazine and online publications including The Guardian, British Journal of Photography, Dazed, Musée Magazine, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and TheModernMet.com. Welch-Kling’s work is included in the book “Women Street Photographers”, edited by Gulnara Samoilova published by Prestel. In 2021, she was one of eight women named a Hasselblad Heroine. Welch-Kling's first monograph, titled “Duologues” was published by Kehrer Verlag in the Fall of 2022.

Gulnara Lyabib Samoilova is an American photographer with over 40 years of experience in documentary, street, and fine art photography. She graduated from the International Center of Photography in 1994 and worked as a staff photo editor and photojournalist at the Associated Press.

Throughout her career, Gulnara has received numerous awards for her photographs, including first prize from the World Press Photo. Gulnara's work is part of collections at the Museum of the City of New York, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, and New York Historical Society.

She is the founder of Women Street Photographers, an online and in-person global community, as well as an artist residency in New York City. Additionally, she is the author of the best-selling book 'Women Street Photographers' (2021, Prestel) and a portfolio book (2023, Peanut Press). With her vast experience and expertise, Gulnara has organized and curated over 30 successful exhibitions in four continents, including the first Women Street Photographers and Leica Women Foto Project Festival in New York City. This three-day event featured group and solo exhibitions, grants, panel discussions, and photo walks, and showcased the work of 75 female photographers from 33 countries. In addition to her curatorial work, Gulnara is also an inspirational speaker, guest judge (Lens Culture, Lucie Photo Book Prize, UNESCO) and portfolio reviewer ( Arles Les Rencontres de la Photographie, PhotoNola).