César Dezfuli

César Dezfuli was selected for the 2023 Shortlist with The long road to a home in Europe.

César Dezfuli was born in 1991 in Madrid, in a context of cultural mixture given his Spanish-Persian origins. Self-taught in photography and having learned his trade as a journalist in various newsrooms, he now works as a freelance photojournalist, focusing on humanitarian crises and international affairs. His assignments and personal projects have taken him to document different realities worldwide, covering the election in Kenya, Rwanda or Kosovo, attending the twentieth anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia, or to China, where he documented families which have flouted the country’s one -child policy. Since 2015, his focus is on the migrant crisis at the borders of Europe, with a special attention on the Central Mediterranean migratory route. His work has been published in international media such as Le Monde, The Guardian or Time Magazine, and recognized with several awards as the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize (UK). It has also been part of individual and collective exhibitions worldwide, as in the National Portrait Gallery (UK), the Museum of Sydney (Australia), or Visa Pour L ́Image (France).

Joanna Łopat-Réno

Joanna Łopat-Réno was selected for the 2023 Shortlist with Ammar in the Polish wardrobe. A story about hiding refugees on the Polish-Belarusian border.

Joanna Łopat-Réno is a journalist, reporter and photographer, author of television and press reports. 

Born in Warsaw, she studied in Łódź (Cultural Studies at the University of Łódź and Photography at the Łódź Film School) and in Italy (Program Erasmus at Università della Tuscia, Facoltà di Lingue e Letterature Straniere), where she stayed on for five more years. 

In 2015, she covered the refugee crisis in the Balkans and started working with the Polish news television outlet TVN24 Biznes i Świat as a world news service editor. 

Since 2020, she has been a freelance journalist cooperating with OKO.Press as well as “Duży Format” – the magazine of reporters of Gazeta Wyborcza. Since October 2021, she has been reporting from the Polish-Belarusian border.

She hosts “Non-normative Conversations” – a podcast produced for the magazine “Liberté”. Her guests are people who are often excluded because of their views and sexual orientation. And it is to them that she gives voice.

She is a co-author in several publications focusing on human rights published by the European Liberal Forum (“Free Voices. LGBT+ Rights in Eastern Europe”; “Democracy without Minorities”) and a contributer in projects on evidence-based sexuality education
and anti-discrimination education managed by the Projekt: Polska Foundation.

Since 2018, she has been involved in the One Caucasus project – an international festival organised in a Georgian region Marneuli – considered to be one of the poorest in the country. It is a project involving local communities (Georgian, Armenian and Azerbaijani) in artistic activities.

She is an active member of the Po-Nad-To Foundation, an organisation working in the field of creative education. She runs documentary photography and film workshops for children and young people.