This panel brings together photographic projects that explore women’s lives within systems shaped by patriarchy, religion, violence, and social control. From Afghanistan under Taliban rule to Iran’s discriminatory laws, from queer lives in Sierra Leone to ultra-Orthodox communities in Israel, and from gang-controlled neighborhoods in South Africa to stories of migration, these works reveal territories where women exist under constant pressure.
In these contexts, survival and resistance are not always loud or spectacular. They often take the form of endurance, education, pleasure, movement, and presence. Through intimacy and long-term engagement, the images affirm subjectivity, restore complexity, and insist on the right to exist, imagine, and persist in spaces that were never meant to belong to women.
Daro Sulakauri is an award-winning Georgian photojournalist dedicated to uncovering hidden narratives. Her work spans Shifting Borders, a visual archive of life along Russian-occupied territory, and in-depth investigations into stolen babies and child marriage. A TED and CatchLight Fellow, she uses photography to elevate silenced voices and challenge injustice.
Forough Alaei focuses on social issues, particularly Iranian women, and is known for her coverage of female football fans, even disguising herself as a boy to enter stadiums. Her work includes the Time magazine cover on the “woman, life, freedom” movement in 2022 and the project “New Face of Iran,” showcasing the lifestyles of Iranian youth and their challenge to societal taboos.
Kiana Hayeri grew up in Tehran and moved to Toronto as a teenager, taking up photography to bridge cultural and linguistic gaps. She lived in Kabul for nearly a decade, exploring migration, adolescence, identity, and sexuality in conflict zones. Hayeri has won the Tim Hetherington Visionary Award, Robert Capa Gold Medal, Leica Oskar Barnack Award, Carmignac Photojournalism Award, and World Press Photo Prize. She published When Cages Fly (2024) and No Woman’s Land (2025). A TED Fellow, National Geographic Explorer grantee, and NYT contributor, she is based in Sarajevo covering Afghanistan, Syria, the Balkans, and beyond.
Maria is a Portuguese documentary photographer and photojournalist. Originally trained as an architect, she shifted to photography after studying analog photography at Ar.Co. Her work explores identity, colonialism, gender inequality, and racism, and has appeared in several major international outlets like The Guardian and Le Monde. She has won several awards, including a World Press Photo in 2025
Ofir Berman is an Israeli documentary photographer exploring identity, belonging, and the subtle tensions between people and their worlds. Working on long-term projects, she engages with communities at social, cultural, and political margins, capturing intimacy, resilience, and contradiction. Moving between documentary and poetic observation, Berman reveals human complexity beyond headlines. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, National Geographic, The New York Times, and other outlets. Since October 2023, she has documented the war in Israel.
Priscillia Kounkou Hoveyda is a Congolese Iranian filmmaker based between South Africa and Sierra Leone. Her work draws on ancestral memory, Blackness, and intersectionality to bear lyrical witness to diasporic Black life. A former human rights lawyer who worked with the UN, her films—including Where My Memory Began and We Will Be Who We Are—have screened internationally and won major awards. She is currently developing multiple documentary projects and is a PhD candidate researching racial Blackness in Iran.
Moderated by
Anastasia Taylor-Lind is a British/Swedish photojournalist and a poet.
For the past decade Anastasia has collaborated with Alisa Sopova, a journalist and an anthropologist from the city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. In 2023, she received the Canon Female Photojournalist Award for her long-term reporting from eastern Ukraine, and over 100,000 people visited her exhibition Ukraine: Photographs from the Frontline at the Imperial War Museum.
Anastasia is a National Geographic Society Explorer, TED Fellow, and 2016 Nieman Fellow at Harvard university. Her first book Maidan – Portraits from the Black Square, about the 2014 revolution in Ukraine, was published the same year. Her debut poetry collection One Language was published by Smith|Doorstop in 2022.
Anastasia has Masters degrees in photojournalism and poetry.
