Directors

Nina Emett (née Chohda) studied photojournalism at the London College of Communications. She has since freelanced for various publications and NGOs. She set up and managed the refugee education charity Salusbury WORLD and photographed and co-wrote the charity’s book Home From Home. She has run educational workshops in schools on photography and global refugee issues. She gained an MSc in International Development in 2005. Nina has also worked strategically in the areas of refugee policy and racist and religiously-motivated Hate Crime. She has organised large partnership events including exhibitions and city-wide arts festivals.

Howard Davies studied photojournalism at the University of London. Since 1987 he has documented major humanitarian crises including Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo and the Middle East, working on assignment for leading aid organisations such as Oxfam, the Red Cross and UNHCR. Previously shortlisted for the Amnesty Photojournalist Award, his touring exhibition on refugees in the UK was sponsored and exhibited by the Guardian. Howard has photographed in the UK and internationally for more than twenty educational children’s books and has extensive experience of running workshops in schools on photography and refugee issues.

FotoDocument has set up a judging panel to select the photography commission applications. Joining Nina Emett and Howard Davies on the panel are acclaimed documentary photographers Simon Roberts, Karoki Lewis and environmentalist / academic Dominic Kniveton.

Panel

Simon Roberts (b.1974) graduated with a first-class BA (Hons) Degree in Human Geography from the University of Sheffield (1996) and a Diploma in Photojournalism from Sheffield College (1997). His photographs have been published and exhibited widely, with recent shows at Klompching Gallery in New York and the Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai. They are represented in major public and private collections, including the Deutsche Börse Art Collection and the Wilson Centre for Photography.

In recognition for his work, Roberts has received several accolades, including the Vic Odden Award from the Royal Photographic Society (2007), offered for a notable achievement in the art of photography by a British photographer; a National Media Museum Bursary (2007) and a grant from the John Kobal Foundation (2008).

He has published two monographs- Motherland (Chris Boot Ltd, 2007) and We English (Chris Boot Ltd, 2009), to critical acclaim. A major exhibition of photographs from We English will be on show at the National Media Museum, Bradford from March – September 2010.

For more information go to www.simoncroberts.com.

Karoki Lewis was born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1967 and schooled in India and England before graduating with a first class degree in Economics from the University of Birmingham.

In 1997-98 he took a postgraduate diploma in photojournalism at the London College of Communications. A mixture of travel and reportage, his work is featured in a number of photographic books on India, as well as in newspapers, magazines and websites internationally, such as Geo, The Guardian, The Independent, The Daily Telegraph, Sunday Times Travel, Harpers & Queen, Condé Nast Traveler, Departures, Time and the BBC.

Since covering the Maha Kumbh Mela in India in 2001, Karoki has embarked on a long-term project documenting the act of pilgrimage around the world using photography as well as audio. Karoki is represented by Axiom in London and by Laif in Germany. He was a prize-winner in the 2003, 2004 and 2006 Travel Photographer of the Year competitions and won the BGTW Photo of the Year Award in 2007.

For more information go to www.karokilewis.com

Dominic Kniveton is a reader in the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex. As a researcher he has been part of a number of projects looking at varying aspects of the environment: NASA’s Mission to Planet Earth WetNet project looking at rainfall around the world using data from a former defence satellite for environmental monitoring, multi-partner projects on the impact of development and climate change on water and ecosystem resources in southern Africa and particularly the Okavango river catchment, landslides in the Alps, primate conservation in South America, management of locusts and Quelea birds in southern Africa and more recently studies of the impact of climate change on human migration in Africa and Asia.

For more information go to www.sussex.ac.uk/geography/profile122700.html