From Sept. 27 to Nov. 23, 2025, Siena will host the 11th edition of the Siena Awards Festival, one of the most internationally recognized events in the field of contemporary photography. With more than 400,000 images submitted from 194 countries, the Festival has built over the years an inclusive and international platform capable of reflecting the variety and complexity of the contemporary world.
The 2025 edition comes with a dense and articulated program that includes ten photographic exhibitions, three international competitions, a day of talks and meetings with protagonists of global photojournalism. All of this will take place within some of the most evocative places in the city and the Sienese territory: from historic palaces to museums, from former distilleries to deconsecrated churches, and even art classrooms and villages such as Sovicille.
The Festival will officially kick off on Friday, September 26, with SIPA Talks (Siena International Photo Awards Talks), scheduled at the Teatro dei Rinnovati. It will be a day of meetings and debates featuring some of the most influential photographers and photojournalists on the international scene. Unpublished reports and firsthand accounts will offer an intense look at central issues of our time: from armed conflicts to climate change, from investigative journalism to the role of photography as a tool of denunciation, memory and awareness. Expected guests include notable names such as Steve McCurry, Pascal Maitre, Muhammed Muheisen, Esther Horvath, Ami Vitale, Javier Aznar, Lucas Bustamante, Fernando Faciole, Shane Gross, Sandesh Kadur, Jabin Botsford, Salwan Georges, Ziv Koren, Adrees Latif and Christopher Occhicone, many of whom collaborate with prestigious publications such as National Geographic, The Washington Post, Stern, Geo and The New York Times.
The following day, Saturday, Sept. 27, also at the Teatro dei Rinnovati, will be the Awards Ceremony for the Festival’s three photography competitions, Siena International Photo Awards (SIPA), Creative Photo Awards and Drone Photo Awards.
SIPA, which is open to professional, amateur and student photographers from around the world, is judged by an international jury composed of distinguished names in photography and photo editors from leading magazines. This year’s jurors include Nathan Tsui, Christian Ziegler, Marco Cattaneo, Carla Rosorius, Alessandra Mauro, Alessia Locatelli, Maxim Sergienko, Luca Miuli, Angela Jimu, Staffan Widstrand, Monica Aldi, Kathrin Bruch, Arne Deepen, Tom Gilks, William Albert Allard, Sarah Leen, Pascal Maitre and Muhammed Muheisen. The competing works range from portraits of different people and cultures to landscapes and animals, from sports photography to storytelling, from underwater images to short documentary films, highlighting the narrative power and emotional impact of photography as a tool for understanding reality. From all of them, the jury will also select the “Photo of the Year.”
The Creative Photo Awards, on the other hand, celebrates photography as an art form, rewarding works that reflect a personal and creative vision. This year’s jury, composed of Lenne Chai, Hana Knizova, Catherine Phillips, Roberta Lancia, Daria Bonera and Adam Letch, aims to value experimentation and freedom of expression. Open to every technique and creative approach, the competition encourages breaking the rules to create new artistic trends. The contest categories reflect this openness, ranging from advertising photography to conceptual art, nature and portraiture to wedding and architectural photography.
Finally, the Drone Photo Awards now represents the world’s most important award dedicated to aerial photography. In addition to images made with drones, the competition also welcomes works produced with helicopters, airplanes, hot air balloons, kites and other aerial media. The jury - made up of Susanna Scafuri, Marchis Cornelia, Federica Quaglia, Elena Buenrostro and Elio lello Piazza - will award prizes to the most innovative looks that manage to transform the view from above into a novel narrative and artistic perspective. The eight competition categories cover such areas as marriage, nature, cities, animals, sports and video.
Award-winning works in the three competitions will be featured in their respective group exhibitions, with the idea of offering the public an overview of the best contemporary visual expressions. Alongside these, the Festival presents five solo exhibitions and one group exhibition in the municipality of Sovicille, distributed in ten venues among historical, museum and school spaces, which amplify the evocative power of the images on display.
Among the most eagerly awaited exhibitions, Mexico Border by Adrees Latif, installed at the Accademia dei Rozzi, recounts the complexity of migration through shots that capture moments of extraordinary intensity in a landscape as fascinating as it is hostile. Canadian-Iranian photographer Kiana Hayeri’s project No Woman’s Land, on view at Area Verde Camollia 85, documents the plight of Afghan women under the Taliban regime, extolling their courage and daily resilience.
Katie Orlinsky, at the Museum of Natural History, with Vanishing Caribou addresses the climate crisis by following the migration of caribou in the Arctic and the plight of indigenous communities that have lived in balance with that environment for centuries. In the same museum, Above us Only Sky features a selection of the best images awarded at the Drone Photo Awards.
The Liceo Artistico “Duccio di Buoninsegna” hosts the group show I Wonder if You Can, which brings together the winning works of the Creative Photo Awards, capable of surprising and subverting expectations through innovative approaches. At the Ex Distilleria Lo Stellino, the exhibition People Sharing All the World brings together award-winning images from the Siena International Photo Awards, culminating with the photograph of the year, while SIPA Story-Telling presents the most intense reportage from the last edition, revealing the visual thinking and fieldwork of photojournalists from around the world.
At the Museo del Paesaggio in Castelnuovo Berardenga, Elliot Ross presents A Question of Balance, a photographic investigation of the human impact of the water crisis in the American West, while at the Centro culturale “La Tenaia” in Sovicille, Jordanian photojournalist Muhammed Muheisen recounts more than two decades of war and survival with the exhibition Life and War, an intense testimony to the power of life even in the most devastated places.
Then, for the fifth year in a row, the streets of Sovicille will be transformed into an open-air gallery with Sovicille Creative, a photographic installation that animates walled doors, windows and historic buildings in the village.
Finally, from September 26 to 28, Piazza del Campo will host a video mapping installation that will officially open the Festival and celebrate the 700th anniversary of the construction of the Torre del Mangia. The work will project SIPA finalist images onto the facades of the Palazzo Pubblico, interweaving them with Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s frescoes and, in particular, theAllegory of Good Government. In that 14th-century work, Lorenzetti makes a radical gesture for his time: he depicts the people, ordinary men and women, protagonists of the city’s daily life. In this visual and sound installation, faces and landscapes of the present ideally join those of the past, shaping a new contemporary allegory of justice, coexistence and shared beauty.
For info: www.sienawards.com
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| Festival celebrating international contemporary photography returns to Siena |
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