2025 SDN Visual Storytelling Festival Speaker Series

Three Photographers Under 30 Making a Difference

Tuesday, April 8, 1:30 pm ET via Zoom

Iva Sidash, Ukraine
Fatima-Tuj-Johora, Bangladesh
Alexandra Corcode, Romania and The Netherlands

A Bangladeshi woman, Hironmala (80), counting her days through pain and enormous sufferings. Photo by Fatima-Tuj-Johora.

A new generation of photographers born at the dawn of the digital and social media age are creating a new vision for photography untethered from 150  years of analog photography.
 

Alexandra Corcode

Alexandra Corcode (b.2000), is a Romanian visual storyteller based between The Netherlands and Romania, with a focus on documentary photography. Corcode’s images aim to offer an emotional and psychological portrait of Romania that is poetic, dramatic, and picturesque. Her practice is characterized by its openness to engage with various individuals, communities, or ideas, fostering a sense of inclusivity and diversity in the creative process, extensive research, and an immersive approach to her subject matter.  

Through her photographic practice, she wishes to bring awareness to overlooked complex situations created by inequality, migration, poverty, tradition, loneliness, and traces of human absence. Alexandra embraces the photographic medium as a means to create encounters that establish relationships and question territories through memories, resilience, and generational transmission, with intimacy and dignity.

Corcode is a recent graduate from the Royal Academy of Art (KABK), The Hague with a BA in Photography. In 2023 she won the Tom Stoddart Award for Excellence from The Ian Parry Photojournalism Grant and was shortlisted for the Kassel Photobook Dummy Award with her book "Your Death is In My Hands". In 2022, she had been selected as an "Emerging talent in photojournalism" by The Guardian, and won the Canon Student Development Programme. Beyond those, she was selected to participate in the 35th edition of Eddie Adams Workshop in New York, having been published in Reuve 6 Mois - La Revue de Photojournalisme and has been selected for the New York Times Portfolio Review.

Fatima-Tuj-Johora

Fatima-Tuj-Johora, a visual journalist and National Geographic Explorer from Bangladesh, specializes in capturing the essence of human stories through her lens. Focused on daily life, children’s and women’s rights, and environmental issues, she blends artistry with information to create compelling narratives. With a background in biological science, Fatima’s transition to photography was driven by her belief in empathy as a catalyst for change. She sees photography as a medium that fosters connection and understanding, allowing her to shed light on pressing social issues like injustice, human rights abuses, and our complex relationship with the environment. Central to her body of work is a focus on the far-reaching impacts of global climate change, exploring its effects on both nature and human lives. Through her lens, Fatima captures moments of resilience and struggle, offering a nuanced perspective on one of the defining challenges of our time. In essence, Fatima-Tuj-Johora’s photography serves as a powerful tool for social change, inspiring empathy, understanding, and action.

She has worked for the Malala Fund, National Public Radio (NPR), Save the Children UK, Bloomberg News, Liberation, Associated Press (AP), and others. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Daily Star, New Age, The Guardian, The Courier, Avax News, Hindustan Times, and many others. Fatima is a regular contributor photographer for ZUMA PRESS and a contract photographer for Reuters.

Iva Sidash

Iva Sidash (b. 1995, Ukraine) is an independent photographer and photojournalist. She is a member of the Ukrainian Association of Professional Photographers and the National Society of Photo Artists of Ukraine. Sidash studied Documentary Practices and Visual Journalism at the International Center of Photography in New York. She is a 2024 Women Photograph fellow.

Since the onset of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Sidash has dedicated her work to documenting the conflict, with a particular focus on the experiences of wounded Ukrainian soldiers and civilians in frontline villages and cities. 

Her work has been published in INSIDER, The Financial Times, Fisheye Magazine, Der Spiegel, Forbes, and more. Sidash’s photography has been showcased in group exhibitions in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Sweden, Spain, Estonia, Poland, and Ukraine. She held two solo exhibitions, “The Wall: Witness to the War in Ukraine,” in Wisconsin, in October 2023, and in San Diego, in April 2024.

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