Vanessa Charlot

Vanessa Charlot is an award-winning documentary photographer, filmmaker, lecturer, and curator. Her work focuses on the intersectionality of race, spirituality, economics, and sexual/gender expression. She shoots primarily in black and white to disrupt compositional hierarchy and explore the immutability of the collective human experience. The purpose of her work is to produce visual representations free of an oppressive gaze. Vanessa seeks to humanize Black bodies through her photography, restoring the dignity and vitality of those often shot as subjects divorced from context, motives, and histories. Her work invites us all to question our relationship to what we think about when we see Black bodies as static images and in motion.

She has worked throughout the U.S., Caribbean and Southeast Asia. Her photographs have been commissioned by The New York Times, Gucci, Vogue, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, Oprah Magazine, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Apple, New York Magazine, Buzzfeed, Artnet News, The Washington Post, and other national and international publications. She lectures at the International Center of Photography.

Polly Irungu

Multimedia journalist, digital editor, and self-taught photographer Polly Irungu is the founder of Black Women Photographers, a global community and online database of Black women and non-binary photographers.

Polly is also a Digital Content Editor at New York Public Radio (WYNC), where she is responsible for managing social media for WNYC and PRX’s “The Takeaway”, a national radio show with over 2 million listeners, pitching news stories and features for “The Takeaway”. Her podcast is ranked the fourth most downloaded, amongst others. As a photographer, Polly’s work has been published in numerous publications, including Global Citizen, NPR, BBC News, The Luupe, MEFeater, Refinery29, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, CNN, HuffPost, OkayPlayer, and OkayAfrica.

In 2017, Polly completed a degree in Journalism from the University of Oregon. Born in Nairobi, Kenya, Polly has lived around the world from Nairobi to Topeka, Kansas to Eugene, Oregon to Washington, D.C., to Little Rock, Arkansas, and ultimately to Brooklyn, New York.

Polly Irungu has spoken about Black Women Photographers, building communities, photography, social media, branding, podcasting, media diversity, African media, and journalism as a guest for Ethel’s Club, 2020 HER|visual|STORY Digital Photography Festival, The Loeries Awards – 2020 Creatives Week, AfricaNXT, Twitter Media, NBC News, Art of Freelance, We Are Black Journos, 2020 Palm Springs Photo Festival, The Guardian Nigeria, National Association of Black Journalists, and the Online News Association.

Leica Camera