Director and founder of STILL, photo gallery based in Milan. Artistic director of Le Stanze della Fotografia in Venice, of the Capri Photography Festival and until 2021 of SI FEST – Savignano sul Rubicone. He is a consultant to the Fondazione Venezia for the management of the photographic heritage. In the 90s he was director of the Photography section of the European Institute of Design in Turin and of the Italian Foundation for Photography. In the years 2002-2003 he was curator of the first photographic auctions of Sotheby’s in Milan. For over 15 years he was a journalist and photographic critic for the pages of Vivimilano and Corriere della Sera. From 2005 to 2014 he was director of Contrasto – Milan and vice president of the Forma Foundation in Milan. Expert in the collecting market, in 2014 he founded STILL Fotografia. He was director of the monthly “Il Fotografo” from 2015 to 2019. Author of several publications on photography, he has curated numerous exhibitions of international authors.
Guido Borsani is the Chairman of the Italian Deloitte Foundation, appointed in July 2021. Prior to this role, he was a member of the Board of the Italian Deloitte Foundation and has been Government and Public Services Industry Leader for Italy, Greece and Malta since 2013. Throughout his career, Guido has supported clients in the healthcare, public sector and publicly regulated sectors in major development and transformation programmes. He strongly believes in Deloitte’s Purpose: make an impact that matters – for our people, society and clients. Guido holds a degree in economics from Bocconi University. He joined Deloitte in 2009, after an initial experience in management consulting and then in financial advisory within a public sector company.
Journalist, she is currently director of photography of iO Donna, women’s weekly magazine of Il Corriere della Sera. Until 2018 she was also the chief picture editor of Amica, the monthly magazine of Rcs Mediagroup. From 1991 to 2005 she was the director of projects at Contrasto agency. She teaches in specialized schools and university courses and follows several authors’ photographic projects on a regular basis. She has been a member of many juries and photographic awards including the editions of World Press Photo (2011 and 2012). From 2010 to 2015 she had a blog about photography on ilPost.it. In 2020 she produced the short film En ce moment, directed by Serena Vittorini, selected by Giornate degli Autori at the Mostra del cinema di Venezia. She has edited several photographic books and numerous solo and group exhibitions.
Sara Rizzo has been working for the Municipality of Milan since 2019 and is currently curator at Mudec – Museo delle Culture, where she deals with the coordination and curatorship of exhibitions, communication and initiatives related to contemporary art. After her master’s degree in History and Art Criticism and the master in Photography and Digital Imaging at IED Venice, she completed the specialization school in Historical – Artistic Heritage at the University of Milan. Before joining the staff of the Municipality of Milan she also worked as a photographer , retoucher and editorial graphic designer. She followed, among others, the edition of the photographic book “Morgan is Sad Today” by Jean-Pierre Maurer and Robert Müller (Koesel, [1969] 2015), supporting the author in the transition from analog to digital; of the artist’s book “Floreros. Historia de ocho letras en quarenta escenas” by Santiago Miranda (Experimenta, 2018), taking care of its layout and multimedia content; of the guide of “Casa Museo Boschi Di Stefano” (Skira, 2020) taking care of the photographic apparatus. In 2022 she curated the Santiago Miranda exhibition “Torri Cotte. Posti unici per leggere e guardare lontano” at the ADI Design Museum in Milan
Born in Cortona in 1981, after years spent taking photographs Antonio decided to turn a dream into a real project; and so, in 2011, Cortona On The Move was born, an international festival of photography and visual narrative created together with a group of friends. In ten years Cortona On The Move has become one of Europe’s most important photography festivals. Antonio is currently deputy director at the Gallerie d’Italia in Turin, situated in Piazza San Carlo: Intesa Sanpaolo’s fourth museum alongside those of Milan, Naples and Vicenza. An exhibition space dedicated to photography covering 9,000 m2 in Palazzo Turinetti, right in the heart of Turin.
Born 1981 in Iran, lives in Tehran. Newsha Tavakolian is known for her powerful work covering wars in Iraq and social issues in her native Iran. With clarity and sensitivity, Tavakolian has photographed female guerilla fighters in Iraqi Kurdistan, Syria and Colombia, prohibited Iranian female singers and the lives of people living under sanctions. Over the years, her practice has shifted from photojournalism to photography as art. A self-taught photographer, Tavakolian began working professionally in the Iranian press at the age of 16, at women’s daily newspaper Zan. At the age of 18, she was the youngest photographer to cover the 1999 student uprising, which was a turning point for the country’s blossoming reformist movement and for Tavakolian personally as a photojournalist; a year later she joined New York-based agency Polaris Images. In 2003, she started working internationally, covering the war in Iraq. She has since covered regional conflicts, natural disasters and made social documentary stories. Her work has been published in international magazines and newspapers such as Time Magazine, Newsweek, Stern, Le Figaro, Colors, The New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, NRC Handelsblad, The New York Times Magazine and National Geographic. Commercial clients include Qatar foundation, who commissioned her to make a book about education around the world and Shiseido, who commissioned a two-year assignment looking at the meaning of beauty in Paris, France. Tavakolian became a Magnum nominee in 2015 and an associate in 2017.
Founder and art director of mc2gallery in Milan, specialized in photography and of the online platform Periscope Photoscouting for the scouting of young Italian and international photographic artists. He is an independent curator for art projects in collaboration with international and Italian galleries or with museums, as Camera (TO) fot the show dedicated to Lisette Model or as MaRT (Trento e Rovereto) for the exhibition about the Photo Studio Manassè, in collaboration with Chiara Spenuso. Since 2018 he is consultant as art advisor for private collections and artistic director of the gallery / private collection of the Hotel Plaza et de Russie in Viareggio (LU). He teaches at the Raffles Design Institute in Milan as guest professor at the Master of Photography and collaborates with Leica Akademie. He has participated as Folio Reviewer for several Italian photography festivals such as Fotografia Europea in Reggio Emilia, Photolux Festival in Lucca, PhotoVogue Festival in Milan and international ones such as Les Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, France, SIPF Singapore Photo Festival and Palm Springs Photo Festival and the Belfast Photo Festival. He has published an essay for the book “Fermo immagine: Arte vita e mercato della Fotografia”, edited by Maddalena Mazzocut-Mis and Chiara Spenuso (ed. Mimesis) and an essay for the catalogue in occasion of the exhibition about Lisette Model at Camera (TO). Since 2022 he is the Art Dircetor of the Ragusa Phooto Festival in Ibla (RG) Sicily.
Erik Kessels is a Dutch artist, curator and communication designer, with great interest in art and photography. Erik Kessels is since 1996 Creative Partner of communications agency KesselsKramer in Amsterdam/London and has created campaigns for national and international clients such as Nike, Heineken, Diesel, Oxfam, Vitra, Citizen M, I amsterdam and The Hans Brinker Budget Hotel. As an artist and curator Kessels has published over 90 books of his ‘re-appropriated’ images and has written the international bestseller Failed It! He has taught at several Art Academies (Amsterdam, Milan, Toronto, Lausanne, Düsseldorf). Kessels made and curated exhibitions such as Loving Your Pictures, Mother Nature, 24HRS in Photos, Album Beauty and Unfinished Father. Currently he’s working on a long-term European art project called Europe Archive. In 2010 Kessels was awarded with the Amsterdam Prize of the Arts, in 2016 nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. In 2022 his mid-career retrospective was shown in Turin, Düsseldorf, Budapest, Rotterdam and he exhibited recently in the SFMOMA. He was called “a visual sorcerer” by Time Magazine and a “Modern Anthropologist” by Voque (Italia).
Melissa Harris is editor-at-large of Aperture Foundation, where she worked for more than twenty-five years, including as editor-in-chief of Aperture magazine from 2002 to 2012; under her leadership, the magazine received many honors, including ASME’s National Magazine Award for General Excellence. Harris has also edited more than forty books for Aperture, and has curated exhibitions for them, the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Milano Triennale (with Germano Celant), Milan; Fondazione Prada, Milan; the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; Villa Pignatelli, Naples; Visa pour l’Image, Perpignan; and C/O Berlin among other venues. She continues to curate exhibitions worldwide. Harris teaches at New York University in the Tisch School of the Arts, Department of Photography & Imaging / Emerging Media. She served on New York City’s Community Board 5 for several years, and is a trustee of the John Cage Trust. A Wild Life, her biography of the photographer Michael Nichols, was published by Aperture in Summer 2017. Her biography of Josef Koudelka, commissioned by Magnum Foundation, was just published by Aperture on November 21, 2023.
Nicolas Jimenez is the director of photography of the French leader daily newspaper Le Monde. From 1999 to 2004 he worked, during his European studies at the Sorbonne University, for the international festival of photojournalism Visa pour l’Image. In 2005, when Le Monde decided to become a major actor of the photo industry he became national photo editor until 2008. Then he became the head of the photo department. Le Monde is now one of the three biggest photojournalism producers in French speaking press.