Jodi Bieber

Jodi Bieber was born in 1967 in Johannesburg, South Africa. She studied at the Market Photography Workshop founded by David Goldblatt in Johannesburg. She began her career in 1993 training as a photographer under the late Ken Oosterbroek for The Star, a daily newspaper. She worked there in the period leading up to and during the 1994 democratic elections. In 1996, Bieber was selected to attend the World Press Masterclass held in Holland. This opened the door to travel the world on assignment for international magazines and NGO’s. Over a ten-year period ending in 2004, Bieber worked on a project that focused on youth living on the fringes of South African society. These images were assembled in the book entitled Between Dogs and Wolves, published in 2006. In 2010, she released her second monograph entitled Soweto, a celebration and portrait of life in Soweto today. Bieber is 2011 winner of the World Press Photo Award with the portrait of Aisha, an Afghan girl whose face was mutilated as retribution for fleeing her husband's house. She received several other awards from World Press Photo in preceding years. Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout the world.

Zohra Bensemra

Zohra Bensemra was born in Algiers, Algeria in 1968. Since 1990, she has worked as a photojournalist covering conflicts, humanitarian issues, and stories about women and politics. She was recruited as a stringer photographer for Reuters in 1997 during the last years of the conflict in Algeria. In 2000, Bensemra was sent on her first assignment abroad for Reuters to Macedonia where ethnic Albanians were taking refuge from Serbian forces. In 2003, she went to Iraq while Saddam Hussein was still on the run. A year later, she was made staff photographer from Reuters in Najaf, Iraq. She has since covered the referendum in Sudan, the Tunisian uprising and the revolution in Libya. Her images are usually taken in countries suffering from internal conflict, be it social, economic, or humanitarian. In 2005, Bensemra won the European Union prize for the best African press photographer. In 2011, her photographs were displayed at the Deutsche Bank building in Frankfurt, Germany. Still based in Algiers she continues to cover some African and Middle East countries.

Djibril Sy

Djibril Sy was born in 1950 in Dakar, Senegal. Being influenced by the photographs of Seydou Keïta and Mama Casset, he was always intrigued by people’s relationship with their own image. So, he wanted to understand more about this relationship, and he was motivated to become a photographer. He completed a two-year degree in photography at the Dakar School of Fine Arts in 1982, and went at the Columbia University in Washington in 1989.  Sy was the official photographer of the city of Dakar between 1984 and 1994. Then, he started to work as a teacher in Photography, first at the Dakar School of Fine Arts then in other art schools of the city. In parallel, he worked as a press photographer for the pan African news agency Panapress between 2000 and 2010. He has produced several photographic reports covering different subjects including the climate change, the fight against poverty, and the conflicts on the continent. His travels led him to witness civil wars in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Ivory Coast, as well as sport events such as the FIFA World Cup. Besides his work for the press, Sy also works as an artist. In his photographic work, he seeks to capture beauty in portraits, landscapes, and abstract images.

George Osodi

George Osodi was born in 1974 in Benin City, Nigeria. He moved to Lagos where he worked in the financial industry in 1994. Later, he decided to pursue a career in photography, and enrolled at the Yaba College of Technology in Lagos. Upon completing his studies, Osodi began as a photojournalist for the Comet Newspaper in 1999. In 2001, he documented the aftermath of a bomb blast in Ikeja Cantonment, Lagos, when he was off duty. A few months later, he joined the Associated Press in Lagos, where he worked for seven years. In 2008, Osodi became a freelance photographer, covering many assignments for both national and international organizations. His photographs depicting social and cultural stories of Nigerians have been published in the New York Times, Time Magazine, The Guardian, and The Telegraph among others. His series Nigeria Monarchs (2012) documents the royal figures across Nigeria who, despite having any constitutional rule since the monarchy was officially abolished in 1963, remain key personalities in the country’s political landscape.