Connie Agius is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She has spent almost three years investigating the Italian mafia groups and people smuggling networks. Connie has worked in radio, television and online for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), and as a producer for Channel 4 News. She has also contributed to Newsweek, Deutsche Welle’s Inside Europe and the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS). Her latest essay, “Bound by Blood: Women and the ‘ndrangheta: a family you can’t refuse” was published in Australia’s leading literary journal, Meanjin. Connie’s multimedia project, Inside the Mafia, will take you inside the lives of women and children in the ‘ndrangheta. She will analyze the inner workings of some of these families and demonstrate what it really means for them to be part of the “Family.”

Yumna Al-Arashi is a documentary photographer focused on women and social issues. Her latest work involves searching for and photographing the last of a generation of women with facial tattooing in Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria. These portraits tell stories of identity in relation to beauty, the Earth, and self-expression. The disappearance of the tradition directly reflects the impacts of religion, war, and socio-economic change in women’s lives within the Middle East and North Africa.

Laylah Amatullah Barrayn is an independent documentary photographer from Brooklyn, New York. Her work explores social bonds and collective histories around subjects as varied as resistance movements in West African Sufism to queer identities among Black women in New York City. With her grant, she will focus on issues specifically related to women in post-conflict Casamance, Senegal, including entrepreneurship, disability, family, and their involvement in the peace initiatives that resulted in the 2014 ceasefire. Her work has been exhibited internationally, and published in the Washington Post, Colorlines and Exposure: The Journal for Photographic Education, among other publications.

Andreea Câmpeanu is a Romanian photojournalist based in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. She holds an MA in Visual Anthropology. Her work often focuses on issues related to displacement and the effects of conflict, arts, fashion and sports culture in marginalized countries and communities. She has lived and worked in Sudan, South Sudan, Madagascar and Lebanon.

Claudia Guadarrama is a documentary photographer based in Mexico. Guadarrama is receiving IWMF funding to support her ongoing photography project of stories of Latin American women with irreversible physical damages from the use of biopolymers as a cosmetic treatment.

Dalia Mortada is a Syrian-American journalist based in Istanbul, Turkey since 2011. She reports for print, online and audio outlets and for the past year has focused on her special project, Savoring Syria. Savoring Syria tells intimate stories of Syria and Syrians through the lens of food, following the Syrian diaspora throughout the Middle East, Europe and North America. The project also offers recipes and interactive opportunities for people to actually engage with Syrians and their culture, serving as a bridge for audiences between the stories they read and listen to and their own personal experiences.

Ginette Riquelme is a Chilean independent photojournalist based in Mexico City, Mexico. After graduating with a Photojournalism degree, she began photographing for several Santiago based newspapers. She worked as a photojournalist for the Associated Press (AP) in Honduras, Central America; as a Photo Editor for the French magazine Psychologies in Mexico, and for Xinhua in Madrid, Spain. She is interested in themes of ethnography, human rights, especially in women rights and created a chapter in Safety for Women Photojournalists and participated with other photographers for workshops sponsored by Article 19 in Mexico. Ginnette’s work has been published in Reuters, The Guardian, and El País, among others. Ginnette’s “Transitar” Project will document a day in the life of transgender children living in Chile.

Kaitlin Prest is the creative director and host of Radiotopia’s The Heart, where she explores intimacy through innovative approaches to sound and storytelling. In 2015 she was the first podcaster to win the prestigious Prix Italia Award, for radio play Movies In Your Head. Her documentary work was awarded the Third Coast International’s Gold Award for Best Documentary (2016) and the Hearsay Festival’s Overall Prize (2014). Her work in radio, podcasting, performance and installation have been featured at audio festivals and conferences around the world. In “No” Kaitlin Prest explores the complicated terrain of sexual boundaries from youth to adulthood. When a long term friendship dissolves over a fraught hookup, Kaitlin goes on to talk to the men she trusts in her life about the gray areas of consent.

Daisy Squires has been working for two years as a producer on the BBC2 documentary series called Exodus, which follows refugees in their journeys through Europe, and received the Broadcast Award for best documentary series in 2016. Lou Marillier is the correspondent in Scandinavia for French newspaper Libération, and a freelance videographer focusing on women stories, from drug-addicted mothers in New Jersey to political activists in the DRC.

Daisy and Lou will produce a short-documentary about the rise in sterilizations for women – often teenagers – in Venezuela, where the brutal recession leaves them little alternative. The film will follow a young gynecologist and a young patient in Caracas as they face this crisis, in their profession and their private life, and give voice to women activists as well as religious figures.

Photojournalist Sonia Narang is an American multimedia journalist based in California who covers socio-political issues, health, the environment, and culture across the Asia Pacific region. She primarily reports on the lives of women and girls, and the challenges they face globally. Narang will receive a Reporting Grant to create a video and audio series documenting the effects of climate change on women in the South Pacific island nation of Fiji.