Graduate Prizes from the School of Arts & Humanities 2025

New Photography Prize 2025

Yvann Zahui

Yako is an Ivorian expression of compassion, offered in times of loss, pain, or grief a significant word used towards rituals of mourning and solidarity. As an artist, Yvann explores how death is honoured across his culture, seeking a visual language that embraces both mystery and shared humanity.

Nancy Xinrui Zhou

Xinrui Zhou is a Chinese photographer and visual artist based in London. Her work, Silent Pulse, explores the complex relationship between fan identity, emotion, and commercialisation in modern football culture. The work examines how football has gradually transformed from a sport rooted in personal emotion and spiritual attachment into a highly commodified cultural phenomenon, and reflects on how fan identity is constantly negotiated between personal affiliation and commercial forces.

Grace Beckwith

Don't U Love Me? by Grace Beckwith (b. 2001), focuses on young women navigating manipulation, toxicity, objectification, and the overarching theme of practising safe sex. How do we define what is “safe” when it comes to sex? Is it a condom, another form of contraception, or reassuring words and a secure relationship? Pressure is put on women to sort out contraception when in an intimate relationship, whereas a man's only responsibility besides a vasectomy is to wear a condom. Oftentimes, even this is disputed.

Pavlo Tymoshenko

Pavlo's multidisciplinary practice examines the intersection of materiality, time, and human presence.

Paloma Passetto de Souza

Brazilian-born, UK-based artist Paloma Passetto uses analogue photography and mixed media to explore themes of identity, belonging, and political resistance. Informed by Latin American decolonial theory, her work investigates how communities shaped by modernity/coloniality resist Western domination through acts of epistemic disobedience and the honouring of ancestral knowledge.

Metro Imaging Award

Yvann Zahui

Yako is an Ivorian expression of compassion, offered in times of loss, pain, or grief a significant word used towards rituals of mourning and solidarity. As an artist, Yvann explores how death is honoured across his culture, seeking a visual language that embraces both mystery and shared humanity.

Metro Imaging Mentorship Award

Naomi Akvama

Naomi Akvama’s practice explores intimacy, identity, time, and perception through quiet, open-ended gestures. Drawn to the invisible forces that shape experience, she traces the layered negotiations between subjectivity, relationality, and temporality. Working across installation, video, photography, and collage, she often treats the medium as a form of listening—attuned to what is unspoken, hidden, unresolved, or emotionally inherited. Her work invites slow feeling and embraces vulnerability, allowing meaning to shift, breathe, and resist closure.

Genesis Imaging Photography Bursary Award

Chandni Raithatha

Chandni Raithatha’s Dada explores her grandfather's journey as a Kenyan Indian migrant, focusing on migration, identity, and memory. Using various media, the work examines how inherited displacements shape our sense of home and self.

Artful Dodgers Imaging Award

Nick Rosenoer

In 2025, Nick travelled to Azerbaijan to create White Apple Red Village, a lyrical documentary exploring the world’s last surviving shtetl (Jewish village) in the Diaspora, and its unusually harmonious relationship with neighboring Muslim communities. The project follows the daily rhythms and intimate gestures of coexistence in a region shaped by foreign occupation, religious persecution, and cultural resilience.

Labyrinth Photographic Award

Po Wang

Po’s project ArchiPoFoto explores the relationship between architecture and photography. Instead of traditional architectural photography, Po integrates architectural ideas into camera design, preserving each image’s artistic and organic qualities. The project concludes with a multi-layered framing approach that highlights how dialogue between art and design enables photography and architecture to support and enrich each other.

Leah Mclaine

Leah Mclaine’s work, Having Had Faith, explores the question of what to do with a religiously-tuned body when the mind has lost faith. She contemplates the medium of photography, and the darkroom printing process, as a way to tarry or delay the moment of departure. Like prayer, it is a means of keeping the nearest and dearest, near and dear.

Rapid Eye Darkrooms Award

Grace Beckwith

Don't U Love Me? by Grace Beckwith (b. 2001), focuses on young women navigating manipulation, toxicity, objectification, and the overarching theme of practising safe sex. How do we define what is “safe” when it comes to sex? Is it a condom, another form of contraception, or reassuring words and a secure relationship? Pressure is put on women to sort out contraception when in an intimate relationship, whereas a man's only responsibility besides a vasectomy is to wear a condom. Oftentimes, even this is disputed.

Anna Laura Schiavi

Anna Laura Schiavi’s project Selva is a meditation on memory and the entanglement of self and landscape. Rooted in the mountainous village of Selva di Ferriere, the work moves through the emotional terrain of returning, both physically and emotionally, to a place layered with personal history and absence. Using analogue photography, sound, and poetry, the project looks at how nature can hold, reflect, and absorb trauma

Stanley Picker Print Fellowship

Yuri Hwang

Yuri Hwang's work Screen (Diptych) explores the performance of intimacy online, where images are always ready to be seen. Referencing Architectural Digest’s Open Door series — hyper-curated celebrity home tours — the work obscures and exposes a posed figure in a private setting through pixelated windows. The backlit images reveal their own construction: the artist is reflected in the mirrored ball, along with the household clutter edited out of the built foreground. Ultimately the images remain equally as censored as their pixelated covers, presenting the viewer and user as controlled voyeurs — allowed only curated glimpses of candid moments.

Woolwich Print Fair Award

Tamsin Loxley

Tamsin's work is an investigation into the language of the land. It sits alongside a regenerative farming practice. The agroecological projects and increasing wilderness of the land inform Tamsin's practice, and the practice helps to deepen an understanding of the land and its future. Focusing on a 34 acre place in Devon, Tamsin's work is a diaristic land archive, paying attention to our unseen relationship to land, soil, nature and wilderness.

Sheila Sloss Award, The Printmakers Council

Alex Beattie

INSIDE THE DOME is a folding screen, made by hand-screen-printing acid dyes onto silk panels. It is also a journey into Alex's subconscious - weaving together personally meaningful drawn images within a mythical dreamscape, to be illuminated by the sun.

The Graham Hughes Award

Mengyuan Xia

With Mengyuan Xia’s series The Boundaries of Flow, her goal was to use jewellery as a medium to physically express psychological perception of the ambiguity of time. While time on a clock is very mechanical and accurate, the way that different people feel the passage of time is very intangible and individual. This led Mengyuan to focus on moments in time, as we experience and remember time through major events in our lives. Her artworks feature physical markers of time – such as clocks, doors, and drawers – but are created using transparent materials – like glass, stone, and silk.

Alex Kinsley Vey

Alex Kinsley Vey’s artistic practice is a philosophical and material investigation into memory, decay, and working-class identity, shaped by his upbringing in southern Ontario. Drawing on lived experience, his work constructs narratives that are both autobiographical and critically reflective, primarily through the medium of contemporary jewellery. He approaches memory not as a fixed or objective truth, but as a series of emotionally charged fragments. His project A Moment of Danger depicts habits such as smoking, drinking, gambling, processed foods, and substance use; treated not as moral failures but intimate rituals of survival, comfort, and escape. These behaviours offer momentary relief, even as they gradually calcify into enduring aspects of identity.

The RJ Washington Bursary

Yilina Yang

Through beautiful yet dangerous forms, Yilina's work reveals how the lure of vanity leads us into silent traps of nothingness. She positions her work between the archaeological and the futuristic, both of which suggest the collapse of time.