Announcing 44 Critics’ Choice Award Winners for 2024

Andrea Wise is an interdisciplinary photo editor, art director, and entrepreneur. She is the visual strategy editor at ProPublica, where she visually edits investigations into abuses of power with an emphasis on documentary photography and editorial illustration. She is also the co-founder of Diversify Photo, a community-based organization committed to creating a more inclusive and equitable visual media industry. As a photo editor, she has also worked with National Geographic, Newsweek, BuzzFeed News, the Intercept, and more. She has juried competitions for the Overseas Press Club, Getty Images, American Photography, and the Society of Professional Journalists. She earned her M.S. in Photography from Syracuse University and her B.A. in Studio Arts from Trinity College, and she is an alum of the Eddie Adams Workshop, the Kalish Visual Editing Workshop, and the Mountain Workshops.

Andrew Sanigar is the Commissioning Editor for Photography and Design at Thames & Hudson, where his role is to develop T&H’s programme of photography publications, including both retrospective, project-based and contemporary monographs alongside anthologies and surveys of histories and themes in photography. Recent monographs Andrew has commissioned include The Unseen Saul Leiter, William Klein: Yes, and Chris Killip and Mona Kuhn: Works, Matt Black’s American Geography and a first retrospective of the work of Evgenia Arbugaeva titled Hyperborea. Highlight anthologies and surveys include In the Black Fantastic and Africa State of Mind by Ekow Eshun, David Campany: On Photographs and Another Country: British Documentary Photography Since 1945.

Andrew Wingert is an Exhibitions Manager at Pace Gallery in New York, a leading international art gallery representing some of the most influential contemporary artists and estates from the past century. Andrew has also been a Director at Yancey Richardson Gallery, specializing in contemporary photography. He has also participated in numerous domestic and international art fairs including Paris Photo, the AIPAD Photography Show, and Photo London.

Ángel Luis González Fernández is a designer, artist, and curator supporting engaging visual arts practices, winner of Business to Arts David Manley Emerging Entrepreneur Awards 2011. His work manifests through PhotoIreland, which he founded in 2010 to stimulate a critical dialogue on Photography. He devises curatorial projects placing conversations in the public realm around visual culture, critical thinking, and works collaboratively with a growing network of organizations, noticeably through ambitious Creative Europe partnerships. During the Summer 2020 lockdown he launched the critical publication OVER Journal, now distributed globally. He received the Arts Council of Ireland’s Visual Arts Bursary to deepen research on the broad historical and specific artistic context of Photography in Ireland, to curate an ambitious survey exhibition in PhotoIreland Festival 2022 and to publish a series of publications on the matter.

Azu Nwagbogu is an internationally acclaimed curator, interested in evolving new models of engagement with questions of decolonization, restitution, and repatriation. In his practice, the exhibition becomes an experimental site for reflection, civic engagement, ecology and repatriation — both tangible and symbolic. Nwagbogu is the Founder and Director of African Artists’ Foundation (AAF), a non- profit organization based in Lagos, Nigeria. He also serves as Founder and Director of Lagos Photo Festival, an annual international arts festival of photography held in Lagos. He is the publisher of Art Base Africa, a virtual space to discover and learn about contemporary art from Africa and its diasporas. In 2021, Nwagbogu was awarded “Curator of Year 2021” by the Royal Photographic Society, UK, and also listed amongst the hundred most influential people in the art world by ArtReview. Most recently, Nwagbogu launched the project “Dig Where You Stand (DWYS) - From Coast to Coast” which offers a new model for institutional building and engagement, with questions of decolonization, restitution and repatriation, the exhibition took place in Ibrahim’s Mahama’s culture hub SCCA in Tamale, Ghana. Nwagbogu’s primary interest is in reinventing the idea of the museum and its role as a civic space for engagement for society at large.

Britt Salvesen is curator and head of the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department and the Prints & Drawings Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Prior to joining LACMA in 2009, she was director and chief curator at the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona. She received her MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art and her PhD from the University of Chicago. Curatorial projects at LACMA include Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium (with Paul Martineau, 2016); 3D: Double Vision (2018); and City of Cinema: Paris, 1850–1907 (with Leah Lehmbeck and Vanessa R. Schwartz, 2022). She is currently preparing, with LACMA co-curator Staci Steinberger, an exhibition titled Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film, which will open in November 2024 as part of the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time: Art + Science Collide.

Cassidy Paul is the Digital Editor at Aperture. Part of the editorial team for aperture.org, she pitches, commissions, and assists in the production of features for the website across original commissions and published features from Aperture titles. She is also the managing editor for Introducing, a web-exclusive series that highlights exciting new voices in photography, as well as an editor for Creating Stories for Tomorrow, a partnership between FUJIFILM and Aperture. Alongside her work in the digital editorial team, she oversees the management of social media for Aperture. Prior to joining Aperture in 2016, she worked as a photo editor at TIME magazine. Her writing has appeared in Aperture and TIME. She holds a BFA in photography from Parsons School of Design at the New School, New York.

Before coming to the Griffin Museum in 2020 she spent fifteen years operating her own photography gallery, wall space creative, closing it in 2020 to make the move to New England and the Griffin. Having a career spanning many paths she has a background rooted in science, business and creative art. This well rounded experience provides a solid background for supporting the Griffin’s mission to encourage a broader understanding and appreciation of the visual, emotional and social impact of photographic art.

The Griffin Museum curates over 50 exhibitions a year. As an institution, we are committed to ensuring that our mindset, our practice, our outreach, our programming and our exhibitions set a framework with priorities for building programs and exhibitions that consider diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion through our mission that is centered around the photograph.

Crista has written many essays about photography, introducing creative artists work to a broader community. She has been a member of numerous panels and discussions on the craft of photography, juried creative competitions and has participated in major portfolio reviews.

Giada De Agostinis is a photo editor at The New Yorker. Before joining the magazine, she was Aperture's Communications Manager. Prior to that, she worked as communications manager at Photograph magazine and Picter. She was also the editor of Paper Journal, a platform of contemporary photography. She holds an MA in publishing from Oxford Brookes University, UK, and a degree in communications from La Sapienza, University of Rome.

Jim Casper is the editor-in-chief of LensCulture, one of the leading online destinations to discover new contemporary photography from around the world. As an active member in the contemporary photography world, Casper loves to meet with photographers and review their portfolios. He curates art exhibitions, publishes books, conducts workshops, serves as an international juror and nominator for key awards, and is an advisor to arts and education organizations.

Karen McQuaid is Senior Curator at The Photographers’ Gallery in London. She has curated exhibitions including Jim Goldberg, Open See (2009); Fiona Tan, Vox Populi, London (2012); Andy Warhol, Photographs: 1976 – 1987 (2014); Lorenzo Vitturi, Dalston Anatomy (2014) and Rosângela Rennó, Río-Montevideo (2016). She has co-curated Geraldo De Barros, What Remains (2013) with Isobel Whitelegg and Made You Look, Dandyism and Black Masculinity (2016) with Ekow Eshun. She has co-edited and produced The New Colonists (2018) by Monica Alcazar-Duarte, published with Bemojake. Karen has curated external exhibitions at The Moscow House of Photography and The National Gallery of Kosovo. She regularly edits artists books and guest lectures across the UK.

Mazie Harris, Ph.D., is an assistant curator in the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, where she conducts research and manages the acquisition, loan, and display of photographs at the Museum from the past and present. Her scholarship has been supported by the Terra Foundation, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Portrait Gallery, the National Gallery of Art, and the Library of Congress. She has worked with photography collections at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Harvard Art Museums.

Megan Wright is a Senior Curator at Saatchi Art. She graduated with a B.S. in Business Administration (minor in Cinematic Arts) from The University of Southern California and also attended UCLA as part of their CIDA-accredited program in Architecture and Interior Design. Megan has over a decade of experience in sales and management. She was a founding partner of The Commons Showroom, a contemporary apparel showroom, and has also worked in entertainment and design for companies including CAA, 3 Arts Entertainment, and Waterworks. Megan is motivated by exceptional design and working with collectors to select artwork that elevates their spaces and defines their passions. Favorite artists include Andy Goldsworthy, James Casebere, Pat Steir and Njideka Akunyili Crosby.

Mick Moore is the CEO and Creative Director of British Journal of Photography, the world’s longest-running photography title. British Journal of Photography has been showcasing pioneers of the art form since 1854. Mick has spent over twenty years developing BJP’s visual signature.

Mutsuko Ota is Editorial Director of IMA magazine. Born in Tokyo, 1968, she started her career as an editor at Marie Claire and worked at several men’s magazines such as Esquire, GQ and others as a feature editor. Besides collaborating with several magazines as a freelance editor, she became involved in various fields including art projects, book and catalogue editing, and film promotion. She became the editorial director of IMA magazine in January 2012. In 2004, she helped produce a physical space called IMA CONCEPT STORE in Tokyo, with the goal of popularizing art photography in Japan.

Paolo Woods is the artistic director of the festival Cortona On The Move, Italy’s main photo festival. In 2023 he is one of the five founding members and the director of photography of Kometa, a print quarterly of long-form journalism, photography, cartography and debate that looks to the East. Paolo is the author of eight books and his projects are regularly featured in the main international publications with reviews in the NYT, Le Monde, the Guardian just to mention a few. He has had solo exhibitions in, amongst others, France, US, Italy, Switzerland, China, Spain, Germany, Holland and Haiti and numerous group shows around the world. His pictures are private and public collections including the Musee de l’Elysée, Unipol, the French National Library, the FNAC, the Sheik Saud Al-Thani collection, the Michalski collection. He has received various prizes including two World Press Photos. He is co-founder of RIVERBOOM, a collective and publishing house that explores the limits of the photographic language.

Russ O’Connell is the Picture Editor of the Sunday Times Magazine in London. He has worked for some of the biggest consumer publications in the UK market as a Photographic Editor and Director. Collaborating with the biggest photographers in the world, both in the UK and abroad, he regularly commissions assignments ranging from high-end celebrity portraiture, to in-depth reportage and long-form documentary photography. Russ has judged numerous high profile photographic competitions for the likes of: The Sony World Photography Awards, Royal Photographic Society awards, BJP, Amnesty International, and is on the judging panel of the Ian Parry Scholarship.

Shana Lopes, PhD, is an Assistant Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She has organized exhibitions on cyanotypes, the 1906 earthquake, Atget, Wright Morris, and Eikoh Hosoe. She was the co-curator of Constellations: Photographs in Dialogue (2021), which paired recent acquisitions with existing work from the collection, and A Living for Us All: Artists and the WPA (2021). Most recently, she organized Sightlines: Photographs from the Collection (2022). Over the past fourteen years, she has gained curatorial experience at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Whitney Matewe is the Deputy Director of Photography at NBC News and MSNBC. Currently based in Los Angeles, but having spent her formative years in various countries around the globe; Matewe relishes creatively collaborating with photographers and artists from all over the world, across various styles of image making. Matewe was previously the culture and entertainment Photo Editor at TIME Magazine — working primarily on portraiture, features and conceptual essays. Additionally, Matewe curated TIME's franchise packages including TIME 100, TIME 100 Next, Women of the Year, TIME 100 Companies and Next Generation Leaders. Prior, Matewe worked on the photo teams at National Geographic Magazine, The New Yorker Magazine, The Intercept and Condé Nast.

Xavier Soule is the CEO of Abvent Group and president and director of Agence VU’, one of the most renowned agencies and galleries for photographers in France and Europe. The aim of Galerie VU’ is to affirm, on the walls, the diversity of contemporary stylistic photographic approaches, and to compare and contrast current viewpoints, so they can dialogue with their differences. Galerie VU’ works like any other commercial gallery: it is simultaneously a space for exhibiting and selling collectors’ editions, offering monograph approaches as well as hosting authors’ dialogues, group and thematic approaches. As a collector himself, Xavier is interested in a wide array of photography. From art pieces to documentary reports, he is particularly interested in cutting-edge photojournalism and contemporary photography that offer innovative approaches to expand our visual understanding of the world, people and light.