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Laura Beltrán Villamizar (Native Agency) is an independent photography editor and writer born in Bogotá, Colombia. She is the founder of Native Agency – a platform dedicated to the promotion and development of visual journalists from Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. Before founding Native, she worked as editor at World Press Photo, where she led educational programmes in Latin America and co-produced the yearly Joop Swart Masterclass in Amsterdam.
Prior to joining World Press Photo, she worked as associate photo editor for Revolve Magazine where she oversaw long-term features, international commissions for print and online, and curated the magazine’s emphasis on visual storytelling. She currently lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
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Shahidul Alam (Majority World) obtained a PhD in chemistry before switching to photography. His seminal work documented the fall of General Ershad. Former president of the Bangladesh Photographic Society, Alam set up the Drik agency, Chobi Mela festival and Pathshala, considered one of the finest schools of photography in the world.
Shown in MOMA New York, Centre Georges Pompidou and Tate Modern, Alam has guest curated at Whitechapel Gallery and Musee de Quai Branly. His awards include Mother Jones and Shilpakala Award.
Speaker at Harvard, Stanford, UCLA, Oxford and Cambridge universities, TEDx, POPTech and National Geographic, Alam chaired the international jury of the prestigious World Press Photo contest. Honorary Fellow of Royal Photographic Society, Alam is visiting professor of Sunderland University in UK and advisory board member of National Geographic.
John Morris describes his book “My journey as a witness” as “The most important book ever written by a photographer.”
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Austin Merrill (Everyday Projects) is a writer, editor, and photographer. A cofounder of Everyday Africa and The Everyday Projects, he is a former West Africa-based correspondent for the Associated Press, and a former editor at Vanity Fair. His writing and photography have been published by Vanity Fair, National Geographic, Wired, Conde Nast Traveler, Departures, The New Republic, and others. His photography has been exhibited internationally, and he has received grants and awards from the Open Society Foundations, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Fund for Investigative Journalism, Society of American Travel Writers, and others. He was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ivory Coast and earned a Master of International Affairs degree at Columbia University.
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Daniella Zalcman (Women Photograph, b. 1986) is a Vietnamese-American documentary photographer based in New Orleans. She is a multiple grantee of the National Geographic Society and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a fellow with the International Women’s Media Foundation, and the founder of Women Photograph—a nonprofit working to elevate the voices of women and nonbinary visual journalists.
Her work focuses on the legacies of Western colonization, from the rise of homophobia in East Africa to the forced assimilation education of Indigenous children in North America. She is also a co-founder of Indigenous Photograph, a co-founder and creative director of We, Women, and one of the co-authors of the Photo Bill of Rights.
Zalcman is a proud member of the Authority Collective and Diversify Photo, as well as a member of the board of trustees of the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund and the board of directors of the ACOS Alliance. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in architecture in 2009.
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Tara Pixley is a queer Jamaican-American photojournalist and assistant professor of journalism at Temple University. Her photography, which reimagines race, gender, and LGBTQ+ and immigrant communities through a liberation lens, has appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, Newsweek, Allure, HuffPost, ProPublica, Nieman Reports, and ESPN, among many others.
She is a 2022 Reynolds Journalism Fellow, a 2021 IWMF NextGen fellow, a 2020 World Press Photo Solutions Visual Journalism Initiative awardee, and a visiting 2016 Knight fellow at Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism.
Pixley is the secretary of the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) Board and the executive director of Authority Collective, an organization dedicated to establishing equity in visual media.
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Andrea Wise and Brent Lewis co-founded Diversify Photo in Spring 2017. Wise is an independent creative strategist working with artists, media outlets, tech startups, production companies, and brands to develop and deploy impactful narrative visual storytelling experiences. She also serves as Secretary of the National Press Photographers Association, where Lewis serves on the Board of Directors. Lewis recently joined The New York Times as a business photo editor after two years as Senior Photo Editor at ESPN’s the Undefeated. Both Wise and Lewis began their careers as photojournalists and now devote themselves to fostering opportunities for photographers from historically underrepresented groups.
