The Prize is produced in partnership with Peckham 24, south London's innovative three-day photography festival. The prize has been made possible by the support of Ms. Ruth Monicka Parasol and The Parasol Foundation Trust.
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2025 Prize theme: Unity
This year the V&A Parasol Prize for Women in Photography invited photographers to respond to the concept of 'unity'. We encouraged submissions which explored how communities, individuals, and even nature have come together to heal, reconcile, and find peaceful resolution. Photographers were encouraged to focus on stories of hope, collaboration, compassion, and the shared human experience. Images reflect photography's transformative qualities, showcasing contemporary imagery which transcends boundaries, mends division, and fosters harmony.
Winners
Congratulations to our four winners
- Morgan Levy
- Spandita Malik
- Tshepiso Moropa
- Tanya Traboulsi
"We are delighted to announce such a diverse and talented group of global artists as the winners of the third edition of the V&A Parasol Foundation Prize for Women in Photography. Each artist represents a bold interpretation of contemporary photographic practice and conceptual responses to the Prize theme, with a strong focus on community building. Their striking artistic ‘interventions’ demonstrate photography’s ability to expand beyond the two dimensional and convey empathy and sensitivity."
Morgan Levy
Morgan Levy is an American artist based in Brooklyn, USA. She combines performance, staged photography and documentary approaches in her ongoing series Spark of a Nail, which depicts women and non-binary individuals working in the building trades as they construct and deconstruct spaces. Informed by canonical 20th century images of work and labour in America (which historically overlooked minority groups), and feminist photographic practices from the 1970s onwards, Levy works in partnership with her collaborators to facilitate agency through self-representation. These emotive photographs disrupt and queer traditional narratives of hypermasculine work environments, and balanced with images of rest and care, provide an important alternative archive of representation.
Spandita Malik
In Jāḷī—Meshes of Resistance, artist Spandita Malik continues her work within rural women's communities in her home country of India. Against a backdrop of gendered violence, Malik works with the women to capture intimate, self-directed portraits which she prints onto local cloth, echoing Ghandi's khadi and India’s fight for independence. The women then add delicate embroidery, shaping the ways they wish to be seen or obscured. Malik says that together the women are 'enmeshing themselves in a stronger fabric of resistance, one stitch at a time.'
Tshepiso Moropa
Tshepiso Moropa is a collage artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Rooted in her cultural heritage, 'Ditoro' (meaning 'dreams' in the SeTswana language) transcends the tradition of small scale, crafted collages to create large, immersive installations inspired by the unconscious mind. Drawing on archival images from Africa alongside the artist's personal photographs, Moropa deconstructs then reconstructs fragments of history using collage techniques, weaving together new and imagined identities in a celebration of African and diasporic storytelling.
Tanya Traboulsi
Tanya Traboulsi is a photographer based in Beirut, Lebanon. Born to an Austrian mother and a Lebanese father, Traboulsi's work explores themes relating to belonging, memory and the concept of home. Shaped by her experiences and dual identity, Beirut, Recurring Dream is a personal exploration of her city and the weight it holds in both her memory and collective history. Combining her photographs with her family's visual archive, Traboulsi connects past to present, creating a new archive which highlights the profound contradictions which define post-war Beirut.
Prizes
- Group exhibition at Peckham 24 festival, alongside accompanying events and public programming
- International travel and two night's accommodation expenses for exhibiting artists to attend the festival in London
- Networking event with Prize selection committee and industry expertsBursaries of £2000 for each exhibiting artist
- Winning artists featured on the V&A and Peckham 24 social media channels and communications
Selection committee
Dr Charmaine Toh is Senior Curator, International Art (Photography) at Tate. Her research focuses on alternative histories of photography and art in Southeast Asia. She was previously Senior Curator at National Gallery Singapore where she curated Living Pictures: Photography in Southeast Asia (2022), the first survey of the history of photography in the region. Before that, she was Programme Director at Objectifs: Centre for Photography and Film where she initiated a new exhibition and research programme. Charmaine co-curated the Singapore Biennale (2013) and is the author of Imagining Singapore: Pictorial Photography from the 1950s to the 1970s (Brill, 2023).
Thyago Nogueira is the head of the Contemporary Photography Department at Instituto Moreira Salles (IMS), Brazil, and founding editor of ZUM photography magazine, published by IMS. He has curated numerous exhibitions such as Daido Moriyama: A retrospective (2022), Miguel Rio Branco: Dreamt Words... (2022), Claudia Andujar: The Yanomami Struggle (2018), Claudia Andujar: In the place of the other (2014), William Eggleston: The American Color (2015), Body Against Body: the dispute of images, from photography to live transmission (2017), Mauro Restiffe: São Paulo, Beyond Reach (2014) and Rosângela Rennó: #RioUtópico (2017). He has guest edited Aperture magazine dedicated to São Paulo photography (2014), chaired the 2020 Hasselblad Award, and organised the Offside project with Magnum during Brazil’s World Cup.
Gillian Wearing is a contemporary artist who investigates the tensions between public and private, fiction and reality, and the relationship between the artist and the viewer. Her performative photographs and films explore personal revelations, private fantasies, and psychological trauma. Drawing on theatrical techniques, fly-on-the-wall documentaries, and reality TV, her work explores public personas and private lives in an investigation of the way in which we present ourselves to the external world. Wearing employs prosthetic masks, voice dubbing, altered photographs, in her portraits of herself, individuals, and groups. Notable series of work by Wearing include Signs that Say What You Want Them To Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You To Say (1992 – 93), in which the artist asked strangers to "write what they were thinking, then photographed them holding the sign." Born in 1963 in Birmingham, England, she moved to London in 1983, she studied at Chelsea School of Art then Goldsmiths College. In 1997, the artist was the winner of the prestigious Turner Prize for her 60 Minutes Silence (1996). She currently lives and works in London. Today, Wearing's works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Guggenheim, New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., among others.