top of page

Through Her Lens

Spotlight on remarkable women photographers around the world


Join us as we celebrate and honour the outstanding contributions by female photographers to the world of photography. Telling compelling stories and challenging stereotypes, these phenomenal artists have pushed boundaries and progressed the medium. Their diverse, vivid and inspiring visual narratives are paving the way for a more inclusive and compassionate world.

Let's see the world through the lens of women. 



Avani Rai, India

Avani Rai is a photographer, filmmaker and actor based out of Mumbai. She has worked as a camera person on a number of short films. She has worked in fiction and documentary. As a photographer she has done serious photo essays on the Bhopal gas tragedy and its after-effects even after 35 long years, the Kashmir story, Chennai water Crisis and many others. Her photographic works have been published in various reputed publications - Indian and international - such as GQ, Vogue, Architectural Digest, The Wire, The Hearst, The platform, Sunday Guardian, Scroll and many others.




Fatemeh Behboudi is an Iranian photojournalist and documentary photographer, a member of Women Photograph. Since 2007 she has worked on assignment for numerous Iranian news agencies. Her images have been featured in TIME, New York Times and Bloomberg Businessweek, among others. She is a 2019 Aftermath Project Finalist for her series 'War Is Still Alive'. Her series 'Mothers of Patience' has received much acclaim including first place in Pictures of the Year International award in 2014, and a 2015 World Press Photo award.



Sarah van Rij, Amsterdam & Paris

Sarah van Rij is a professional photographer based between Amsterdam and Paris. She documents fleeting fragments of life on the street with vivid hues and patterns. She has collaborated in projects for, among others, JACQUEMUS, Hermès, Vrij Nederland, The Last Magazine and Pigalle Paris.



Lisa Sorgini, Australia

Lisa Sorgini is an Australian artist currently residing in northern New South Wales (Bundjalung Country). Her practice engages with the complexities of the human condition and investigates the dominating societal perceptions and constructs that are often vastly at odds with the lived experience. She is deeply interested in the way our familial relationships, particularly the mother role looks and changes over time. Her work has been exhibited and published extensively worldwide, with recent interviews and features in The New Yorker, TIME Magazine, Creative Review and National Geographic.




Hélène Binet, a Swiss-French photographer based in London, is regarded as one of the leading architectural photographers in the world. She is most known for her work with architects Peter Zumthor, Zaha Hadid and Daniel Libeskind, and has published books on works of several architects. Binet was also the recipient of the 2019 Ada Louise Huxtable Prize, awarded to a woman who has made a major contribution to architecture, and is one of the Royal Photographic Society’s Hundred Heroines.



Pia Riverola, Mexico City & LA
Pia Riverola was born and raised in Barcelona, and currently resides between Mexico City and Los Angeles. With an acute eye for detail and color, she creates captivating imagery across the genres of fashion, still life, landscape, and architectural photography. 



Hannah Reyes Morales, Philippines
Hannah Reyes Morales is a Filipina photographer who focuses on bringing historical memory and current events home, by looking at how they shape daily life. She was commissioned as the Nobel Peace Prize photographer in 2021. She is the recipient of a 2023 Pictures of the Year International Award, and a 2023 World Press Photo Award.

Hannah is currently focusing on longer term projects. She is a co-founder of Emerging Islands, a grassroots program connecting artists with scientists and coastal communities to tell island stories through art.




Ola Allouz is an Emirati artist born in Dubai, with a particular focus in culture and daily life photography. Her photography reveals an almost mathematical approach towards details and symmetry, and a powerful passion for sharing untold stories. This unique mixture of perspective has garnered various international awards and photography distinctions from different countries around the world.
Currently, Ola is a Fujifilm brand ambassador. She also founded the @foto.uae Instagram feed, which organizes periodic photo-walks and meet-ups around UAE for like-minded creatives to foster relationships across artist communities.



Suzan Pektaş is an İstanbul based photographer. She developed her passion for visual language during her college years and chose it as a profession. She explores various forms of expressions at the crossroad of visual art and documentary since 2015. Her current projects focus on identity of the individual in relationship to his or her environment, dealing mostly with women, urban transformation and immigration.



Graciela Magnoni, Singapore

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 that period she covered democratization of many countries in the region. In 2003 she moved to Singapore and started working on personal projects around the world. Her latest book, titled Watan, about the state of Punjab partitioned between India and Pakistan, was published in 2021.




Evgenia Arbugaeva was born in the town of Tiksi, located on the shore of the Laptev Sea in the Republic of Yakutia in Siberia. In her personal work she often looks into her homeland - the Arctic, discovering and documenting the remote worlds and people who inhabit them. Evgenia is a National Geographic Society Storytelling Fellow, and a recipient of the ICP Infinity Award, Leica Oskar Barnack Award. Her work has been exhibited internationally and appeared in publications such as National Geographic, Time and The New Yorker magazines among others. She lives in London, UK.




Tania Franco Klein is a Mexican artist currently working with photography, GIF and installation. Through the use of large-scale cinematic and vivid photographs, which exist in multilayered fragmented installations -- composed of murals, videos, and framed photographs, her practice mainly centers around the examination of modern anxieties and the performative stresses that come from living life online with a constant fixation on self-improvement, productivity, the effects of media overstimulation, and the way we profile ourselves and others into fitting our understanding of today's eclectic and fragmented realities. Her work is held in the permanent collections of The MoMA in New York and The Getty Center in Los Angeles



Saumya Khandelwal is a contributing photojournalist for TIME, National Geographic, and The New York Times, among others, based in New Delhi. Her work focuses on gender and environmental issues. She is a Getty Images Instagram Grantee 2017 for her work 'Child Brides of Shravasti'. Saumya was nominated for the World Press Photo 6X6 Global Talent Program from the Asia region in 2019. Over the past 10 years, she has built a diverse body of work spanning journalistic and documentary genres of photography.



Myriam Boulos, Lebanon

Myriam Boulos is a Lebanese documentary photographer and artist. Her work has been published in Vogue, Time, and Vanity Fair, among other publications. Myriam is also a co-founder and photo editor of Al Hayya, a bilingual magazine that publishes literary and visual content on the works, interests and strife of women in her region. At the age of 16 she started to use her camera to question Beirut, its people, and her place among them. She graduated with a master degree in photography from ALBA in 2015. Today, she uses photography to explore, defy and resist society.

In 2021, she was awarded the Grand Prix ISEM for Documentary Photography as well as the second prize of PhMuseum Women’s Grant. She was also named as a Foam Talent and joined Magnum the same year.




Sarah Waiswa is an award winning Ugandan-born, Kenya-based documentary and portrait photographer with an interest in exploring the New African Identity on the continent. Sarah's work explores social issues on the continent in a contemporary and non-traditional way. Her work has been exhibited around the world, and most recently at the Africa Fashion exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. Her photographs have been published in the Washington Post, Bloomberg, and the New York Times, among other publications and she has worked with brands such as Christian Dior and Chloe.

In 2021 she founded African Women in Photography, a non-profit organisation dedicated to elevating and celebrating the work of women and non-binary photographers from Africa.




Yukari Chikura was born in Tokyo, Japan. She won the 2016 Steidl Book Award, and her book 'Zaido' was published by Steidl in 2020. She also won the 2016 LensCulture Emerging Talent Awards, the Julia Margaret Cameron Award, the IPA International Photography Awards, and the Photolucida Critical Mass TOP 50 in 2015-16. Her work has been published in New York Times, Guardian, and Vanity Fair, among others. Her works have been collected in the Museum of Modern Art, TATE, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Griffin Museum, and the Bibliotheque Nationale de France.




Nicky Quamina-Woo is a New York City based, Black + Native Hawaiian investigative photographer and visual storyteller, who divides her time between the African continent, Southeast Asia and New York City. Woo has traveled to more than 30 countries, largely focusing on documenting social injustice and unrest with projects that center on the complicated realities that frame those events, particularly as precipitated by the legacy of western colonization.




Yelena Yemchuk's output as a visual artist is immediately recognizable, regardless of medium. Yemchuk has shot for the New Yorker, New York Times, Another, ID, Vogue, and others. Yemchuk released her first book Gidropark in April 2011, followed by Anna Maria, published in 2017. She had her first institutional debut with her project Mabel, Betty & Bette, a photography and video work at the Dallas Contemporary Museum. Her newest book Odesa was released in 2022 by Gost Books.



Curated and compiled by Kamal Chawla, Hunny Awatramani and Brij Trivedi


Comments

bottom of page