Judges
Lou Tsatsas studied literature, history, languages and political sciences before turning to arts. After working with various creatives in New York, she moved back to France and started her journalistic career. Now senior editor of Fisheye Magazine’s website – a media for which she has been working for more than 5 years – she aims at promoting new visual aesthetics and narratives and pays great attention to the visibilisation of minorities.
Samantha McCoy is the director of the Magnum Gallery in Paris. Sam grew up in New York City and has been at Magnum Photos for more than five years, previously at Magnum, New York, where she worked in artistic direction online. She moved to Paris in August 2019, launching the Square Print Sale’s European distribution before taking over the Paris gallery in March 2020. Before Magnum, Sam was the gallery manager at Jason McCoy Gallery in New York. A member of the ADAA, Jason McCoy Gallery specializes in modern art in both the secondary and primary markets. In New York, she curated exhibitions that were profiled in the New York Times and the Washington Post. A native to the art world, Sam is the daughter of Jason McCoy and the great-niece of artists Jackson Pollock and Charles Pollock.
Steven V-L Lee is a Malaysian freelance photographer based in London. He began his photographic career as a documentary and travel photographer in the late 90s when he began writing travel-related articles for magazines and journals and delved into fashion and lifestyle work in the 2000s.
In 2009, Steven initiated the KUALA LUMPUR INTERNATIONAL PHOTOAWARDS, an annual international portrait photography competition centred in Malaysia, focussing on the best in contemporary portrait photography and has attracted the participation of some top international photographers. Steven believes in the importance of photography education and ran workshops through the EXPOSURE+ Photo Mentoring platform with other Malaysian photographers. In 2021 he co-founded EXPOSURE+ PHOTO FESTIVAL in Kuala Lumpur as a platform to discover and exhibit new artists as well as expose international works. Steven has been a regular portfolio reviewer at international festivals and currently serves as a nominator for the Leica Oskar Barnack Award.
Director of Magnum Photos from 2000 to 2006, Diane Dufour has curated many exhibitions, including L’Image d’après at the Cinémathèque Française in 2007. In 2010, Diane Dufour created LE BAL with Raymond Depardon, in a former cabaret from the Roaring Twenties behind the Place de Clichy in Paris. Internationally acclaimed for its exhibitions (Anonymous: America With No Name (2010), Topography of War (2011), Images of Conviction – The Construction of Visual Evidence (2015), Reversing The Eye – Arte Povera and beyond 1960-75: photography, film, video (2022), Joanna Piotrowska (2023)), LE BAL reveals and supports emerging talents (Mohamed Bourouissa, Clement Cogitore, Noémie Goudal, Joanna Piotrowska…). Since 2008, Diane Dufour is co-director, with Christine Vidal, of the collection Les Carnets du Bal which considers the implications of today’s image society through original contributions from artists, historians and anthropologists.
Johan Trujillo Argüelles (Mexico, 1983). Director of the Centro de la Imagen (Mexico) since 2020. She has participated as a portfolio reviewer in PhotoEspaña, Valparaíso International Photography Festival, among other photographic events in Mexico. She has been dedicated to cultural management for over 15 years during which she has conceptualized and organized conventions, forums, lecture series, and academic programs to discuss visuality and Mexican contemporary photography. As Head of Centro de la Imagen’s Education Department (2011-2017), she was an observer of the creative processes of young photographers to conceptualize and materialize their visual projects. The blind photographer is the center of her reflections on images, the subject of which she has organized exhibitions, published articles, and edited books. She has a master’s degree in Critical Theory.
Amelie is a curator, cultural programmer, and creative producer who focuses on the crossroads between artistic production, culture, and society. From October she will be director of Photoforum Pasquart, a museum focused on contemporary photography and promoting talent located in Biel Switzerland. Since 2020 holds the position of head of public practice at Foam Amsterdam. She strives to bring new perspectives, knowledge, and experiences to the museum’s programme. Some of her projects include the in-depth programming ‘On Assignment – How to navigate the media industry’, the solo show ‘The Start of Something » by Gulsah Bayrak at project space MAQAM, and the conceptualisation of the Foam Talent programme 2024. From 2018 until 2020, she was a curator at Unseen Amsterdam. Next to overseeing the yearly talk programming and collaborations with art academies, she curated, among others, the group exhibitions ‘Woven Matters’ and ‘When Records Melt’. Before this, she worked for several years in different commercial galleries in Switzerland, including Christophe Guye Galerie and Hauser & Wirth. Amelie regularly participates in portfolio reviews, offers mentoring to emerging photographers and guest teaches at different art academies.
