Prof. Dr. Karen Fromm, born 1968 in Hamburg, studied Art History, Literature, Culture and Media Management in Heidelberg, Hamburg and Berlin and graduated from Berlin’s Humboldt University with a dissertation on ‘The Picture as Witness: Staging the Documentary Aspects of Artistic Photography since 1980’. From 1995 until 1997, she managed the Galerie Pfefferberg in Berlin. In 1999, she took on the leadership of the Department of Exhibitions, CSR and Corporate Design at the publishing house Gruner + Jahr. Till 2011, she was a member of the management of the FOCUS photography and press agency. Karen Fromm has been a professor in the degree programme ‘Visual Journalism and Documentary Photography’ at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Hanover since 2011. Her areas of research and teaching are photo and image theory, pictorial languages and the documentary. In addition to her teaching activities, she is the head of the International Class, which the degree programme established in 2017. She has founded the interdisciplinary research and discourse platform [IMAGE MATTERS] and edited the volumes 'Images in Conflict / Bilder im Konflikt' (2018) and 'image/con/text. Documentary Practices between Journalism, Art and Activism' (2020). She has also been Dean of Studies at the Department of Design and Media since 2022.

Born in Ulm, Germany, Nanna Heitmann covers current events, such as the invasion of Ukraine, while pursuing longterm projects that often focus the way people respond to and interact with their environment. Heitmann has documented the effects of climate change, such as catastrophic forest fires and melting permafrost in Siberia (As Frozen Lands Burn), as well as the peatlands of the Congo Basin, which serve as the world’s largest carbon reservoir (Beneath The Trees). She has been published by National Geographic, Time, and M Le Magazine du Monde, among others, and contributes to The New York Times and the New Yorker. Her visual journalism has been recognized with numerous prizes, including the Olivier Rebbot Award for her work on Russia’s Covid experience, and a World Press Photo Award for her story on forest fires. Heitmann became a full member of the Magnum photo agency in 2023, won the Stern Prize 2023 in the category ‘Photo Story of the Year’ and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2024.

Gilles Steinmann is Director of Photography at the daily newspaper "NEUE ZÜRCHER ZEITUNG" (NZZ) in Switzerland. He has been a photo editor for over 16 years, has worked for several major Swiss publications and has been involved in covering some of the most historic global news stories. One of his main roles at the newspaper is to develop new ways of storytelling for both print and online to provide their readership with in-depth visual coverage. From 2017 to 2020, he published over 150 photo essays in print and online as "Photo Tableau" to give photographers a platform to tell their stories. Gilles Steinmann has been a jury member at national and international photo competitions such as the Lumix Festival for Photojournalism in Hannover, Germany.

After graduating from high school, Andreas Trampe completed a photo traineeship and then worked for seven years as a photo reporter for daily newspapers and various magazines (including BUNTE and BILD AM SONNTAG). From 1991 to 1996 he was Director of Photography at BILD AM SONNTAG, since 1996 he has been at STERN. There, he first worked as deputy department head in the picture department and later as Director of Photography for 19 years. Since 2019 he has been working for the magazine as Senior Photo Editor. Andreas Trampe is co-founder of the "Hamburg Portfolio Review" and the stern sponsorship program "Young Photography," in which each year a student receives a one-year photography position at the magazine after graduating from university.