The Women by Women Shortlist
Featured artists: Agathe Breton | Alice Poyzer | Anaïs Kugel | Angela Cappetta | Avery Norman | Bettina Pittaluga | Carla Rossi | Chantal Pinzi | Clara Belleville | Delali Ayivi | Elizabeth Bick | Elizabeth Haust | Elsa Hammarén | Forough Alaei | Francesca Allen | Giulia Gatti | Hillary Foxweldon | Jana Margarete Schuler | Jip Schalkx | Keerthana Kunnath | Kiana Hayeri | Kristina Podobed | Laila Annmarie Stevens | Laura Pannack | Lexi Hide | Lily Dabe | Luisa Dörr | Magdalena Wosinska | Manyatsa Monyamane | Maya Inès Touam | Mirielle Rohr | Myriam Boulos | Nora Lorek | Ofir Berman | Pretika Menon | Priscillia Saada | Priscillia Kounkou Hoveyda | Rehab Eldalil | Rhiannon Adam | Silvana Trevale | Suzie Howell | Tara L. C. Sood | Turkina Faso | Vera van Dam | Youn Jung Kim
The tenth anniversary of the PhotoVogue Festival is dedicated to Women by Women, taking its name from the theme of PhotoVogue’s global open call. More than a theme, Women by Women is a curatorial position. It is an invitation to reconsider how women see, how they narrate their lives and bodies, and how they imagine freedom, care, desire, resistance, intimacy, and power.
Women by Women was born from a simple but uncomfortable truth. While progress toward gender equality has been made, parity remains far from achieved. The art and image making world is no exception. Women continue to be underrepresented in exhibitions, collections, leadership roles, and cultural narratives, while recognition remains uneven and fragile.
Launched in the spring of 2025, the response to the open call was extraordinary. Nearly 100,000 submissions were received from more than 9,500 artists across 149 countries and territories. What emerged is a vast and resonant constellation of images that affirms the urgency, complexity, and richness of the female gaze today. From documentary to fashion, from deeply personal narratives to collective and political visions, the works presented here challenge inherited representations and reclaim authorship, visibility, and agency.
The artists presented in Women by Women were selected by an exceptional international jury of photographers, artists, editors, and curators whose practices actively shape the present and future of visual culture. Working alongside the Condé Nast Committee, these voices brought rigor, care, and responsibility to the selection process, guiding the formation of this historic project with close attention to ethics, representation, and artistic excellence. The full list of jurors is available in the colophon.
The exhibition unfolds within this extraordinary historic room of the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense as a single imagined book. Women by Women becomes a collective volume in which each artist is presented as a chapter. These chapters take physical form as open books, suggesting a shared yet plural narrative in which no single voice dominates, and meaning is built through proximity, dialogue, and accumulation.
At the heart of the space, forty-five selected artists form the core chapters of the book. Their works invite close looking and sustained attention, asking viewers to slow down and enter each visual world as one would enter a text.
At the conclusion of the Women by Women room, a large-scale slideshow brings together all 150 women artists from the open call shortlist. This final gesture gathers the full chorus of voices into a single visual flow, emphasising connection rather than hierarchy, and reinforcing the idea of Women by Women as a living and expanding archive.
Together, these works form a visual and political statement. They do not offer a single definition of womanhood, nor a unified aesthetic. Instead, they affirm multiplicity, contradiction, vulnerability, and strength. Seen together, they insist on presence. They ask not only to be looked at, but to be read, listened to, and remembered.
