Luis Valtueña
International
Award
Humanitarian
Photography

Francisco Rey Marcos is a researcher, founding member and co-director of the Institute of Studies on Conflict and Humanitarian Action (IECAH). He has experience in the humanitarian field since the 1980s in various countries and conflict contexts. He has worked for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and as a consultant for several UN agencies (FAO, OCHA, IOM, UNHCR…), the European Commission Humanitarian Office (DG-ECHO), the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) and numerous NGOs. He is the director of the Humanitarian Action Reports that IECAH has been producing since 2003 with Médicos sin Fronteras-Spain.

Fiona Wachera is a media strategist, photo editor and the Storytelling & Content Specialist at the Aga Khan University. Their work blends hands-on design for photo, art direction, and media project management, utilizing varied communication mediums, design disciplines, and research techniques. Wachera has collaborated with storytelling teams at Everyday Africa, the World Press Photo Foundation, Black Women Photographers, the Hamburg Portfolio Review, amongst others.

They write a photography column for the VII Foundation’s blog called Postcolonial Perspectives, which showcases new photography from Africa and visual stories that foreground embodied experiences and challenge colonial histories.

Photographer born in Montevideo, Uruguay. In 2005 he started working as a photojournalist at the newspaper El País in Montevideo. In 2009 he was appointed photo editor of the supplements that accompany the newspaper. Throughout those years, he was commissioned to cover various international events accompanying the political, economic and social changes in Latin America.

In 2015 he was appointed head of photography, where he was in charge of the daily organisation of the section, coverage, decisions and the management of thousands of photographs. He has published in Latin American and European media and in several books such as Ataraxia (2013) and Larga Distancia (2017). In 2015 he founded El Ministerio Ediciones, a publishing house specialising in photography books. In 2022 he exhibits “Nada de lo que hablamos importa”, his latest personal work.

He has been a jury member in the World Press Photo contest in the 2024 edition.

Half Spanish half French, Catalina started her photographic trajectory after a 5 years stay in New York and studying at the International Center of Photography. Yemen has been her first territory of investigation and documentation and lasted for 10 years. Her immersion at the Yemeni revolution earned her the ICRC’s humanitarian Visa d’or in 2011.

After a decade covering Muslim world from Morocco to Iran, Yemen and Egypt, Catalina turned to Latin America. Colombia became her first country of choice working on the post-conflict. She won the Canon Woman Photojournalist Award in 2017 and her images were exhibited at Visa pour l’Image Festival and around the world. This work has also won the “Contemporary issues” prize at Worldpress 2019, and one of the photos was nominated for “Photo of the Year”. The project was a finalist for the 2020 Oskar Barnack, Global Peace Award and Alexia Foundation. She then worked in Indigenous communities.

Catalina won the POY LATAM award with her work on the Sarayaku indigenous people in the Ecuadorian Amazon in 2021. In 2022, she won a grant from the Centre National d’Arts Plastiques for a project on youth in Chile, more artistic approach on documentary issues because Catalina played with a large format camera. She is also part of the “Grande commande photographique” from the French Ministry of Culture and the BNF for her work on outdoor schools. In 2024 she won the Françoise Demulder award in Visa pour l’Image Festival.

The photojournalist has been a regular contributor to French and international press. Distributed by Panos Photo Agency in London.

Thana Faroq, a Yemeni-born photographer, writer, and educator living in the Netherlands. Her multidisciplinary work, which combines photography, textual narratives, and moving images, explores the transformative experiences that have shaped her identity and sense of belonging in both Yemen and the Netherlands. Focused on themes of memory, migration, and intergenerational trauma, her work serves as a visual autobiography, highlighting women’s resilience and the search for belonging in post-disaster contexts. Thana has received several honors, including the Open Society Foundation Fellowship Grant, the Mondriaan Fonds award, and the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC) Visual Arts award. She was recognized as ‘One to Watch’ by the British Journal of Photography in 2020 and won the PhotoWien Photo Book Award in 2021 for her book “I Don’t Recognize Me in the Shadows.” Currently, she is a fellow in the first iteration of the Arab Documentary Program at (AFAC). She also teaches photography at the Royal Academy of Art The Hague (KABK)

She holds a degree in Fine Arts from the New School for Social Research in New York and a Master’s degree in management functions from ESADE. She is a Spanish cultural manager, independent curator, photographer’s agent, editor and teacher of documentary photography.

She has directed the Photographic Social Vision Foundation in Barcelona since 2001. She has worked at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, at the Centre for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona and for the World Press Photo Foundation in Amsterdam as secretary of the Jury of the 2018 edition of the competition. As a nominator of young talent, she collaborates annually with the Albert Camús Incipiens Award, the Leica Oscar Barnack Award and the Joop Swart Masterclass grant. She has been a jury member for the Poy Latam, Luis Valtueña, Joven Talento FNAC, Luis Kasado and Zampa awards; she has also been a member of the graphic editing board of the Covid Archive in 2021 and 2022.

She represents and manages photographic archives of national authors such as the first woman photojournalist in Spain: Joana Biarnés, the French photographer Jacques Léonard, Mey Rahola, Leopoldo Pomés, Ferran Freixa, Isabel Azkarate, Manuel Outumuro, Anna Turbau and Oriol Maspons. Since 2014 he has been a member of the Committee of Experts that promotes the Pla Nacional de Fotografía de la Generalitat de Catalunya and since 2021 a member of the Plataforma Centro de Fotografía e Imagen.

Web

With a background in advertising, photography, and design, he founded his own communications company after working in advertising agencies and the media. On a personal level, he opted for communication oriented to social change and created new business projects focused on that model. Since then, he has worked in communication, awareness-raising, and advocacy with numerous public organizations, foundations, and NGOs.

He has been linked to Médicos del Mundo for more than ten years and has played different roles within the organisation. He has been a member of this jury in recent years. He is currently the director of communication, fundraising and advocacy at Médicos del Mundo.