The V&A announces the winners of the 2025 V&A Parasol Foundation Prize for Women in Photography, the third iteration of the museum’s open call prize which identifies, supports and champions the talent of global female photographers.
The four recipients of the Prize will each receive a bursary of £2,000 and will exhibit their work in a group show at the Copeland Gallery, London, as part of the Peckham 24 festival programme, south London’s vibrant week-long contemporary photography festival. The exhibition runs from 16-25 May 2025.
This year’s submissions represent an exciting and diverse approach to global contemporary photographic practice, with artists demonstrating innovative and creative responses to the Prize theme of ‘Unity’. Emerging and established photographers from countries spanning Latin America, Europe, MENA and South Asia submitted strong visuals which explore how communities, individuals, and even nature come together to heal, reconcile, and find peaceful resolution.
The 2025 Prize winners were selected by the V&A’s external selection committee, co- chaired by Fiona Rogers, the inaugural Parasol Foundation Curator of Women in Photography at the V&A, and Vivienne Gamble, co-Founder of Peckham 24. They were joined by Dr Charmaine Toh, Senior Curator, International Art (Photography) at Tate, Thyago Nogueira, Head of the Contemporary Photography Department at Instituto Moreira Salles in Brazil, and the award-winning British artist Gillian Wearing.
Of the winners, the committee said: ‘We are delighted to announce such a diverse and talented group of global artists as the winners of the third edition of the V&A Parasol Foundation Prize for Women in Photography. Each artist represents a bold interpretation of contemporary photographic practice and conceptual responses to the Prize theme, with a strong focus on community building. Their striking artistic interventions demonstrate photography’s ability to expand beyond the two dimensionaland convey empathy and sensitivity.’
The Prize is part of the V&A’s Parasol Foundation Women in Photography Project, which amplifies the voices of women, celebrates diversity and promotes equality in the arts. It has been made possible by the generous support of Ms. Ruth Monicka Parasol and The Parasol Foundation Trust. The Foundation actively supports women to achieve their potential in science, health, heritage and the arts.
Morgan Levy is an American artist based in Brooklyn, USA. She combines performance, staged photography and documentary approaches in her ongoing series ‘Spark of a Nail’, which depicts women and non-binary individuals working in the building trades as the construct and deconstruct spaces. Informed by canonical 20th century images of work and labour in America (which historically overlooked minority groups), and feminist photographic practices from the 1970s onwards, Levy works in partnership with her collaborators to facilitate agency through self-representation. These emotive photographs disrupt and queer traditional narratives of hypermasculine work environments, and balanced with images of rest and care, provide an important alternative archive of representation.
In ‘Jāḷī—Meshes of Resistance’, artist Spandita Malik continues her work within rural women’s communities in her home country of India. Against a backdrop of gendered violence, Malik works with the women to capture intimate, self-directed portraits whichshe prints onto local cloth, echoing Ghandi’s khadi and India’s fight for independence. The women then add delicate embroidery, shaping the ways they wish to be seen or obscured. Malik says that together the women are ‘enmeshing themselves in a stronger fabric of resistance, one stitch at a time.’
Tshepiso Moropa is a collage artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Rooted in her cultural heritage, ‘Ditoro’ (meaning ‘dreams’ in the SeTswana language) transcends the tradition of small scale, crafted collages to create large, immersive installations inspired by the unconscious mind. Drawing on archival images from Africa alongside the artist’s personal photographs, Moropa deconstructs then reconstructs fragments of history using collage techniques, weaving together new and imagined identities in a celebration of African and diasporic storytelling.
Tanya Traboulsi is a photographer based in Beirut, Lebanon. Born to an Austrian mother and a Lebanese father, Traboulsi’s work explores themes relating to belonging, memory and the concept of home. Shaped by her experiences and dual identity, ‘Beirut, Recurring Dream’ is a personal exploration of her city and the weight it holds in both her memory and collective history. Combining her photographs with her family’s visual archive, Traboulsi connects past to present, creating a new archive which highlights the profound contradictions which define post-war Beirut.
Main Image: Installation at the Peckham 24 festival, May 2024. © Peckham 24 and Deniz Guzel (Guzel Photography)
Anna Melnykova, "Palace of Labor (palats praci), architector I. Pretro, 1916", shot with analog Canon camera, 35 mm Fuji film in March 2022.
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