Six photographers from the Arab Documentary Photography Program (ADPP) have been selected for the 2026 ADPP Alumni Fellowship program.
From Algeria, Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon and Sudan, the 2026 Fellows’ projects trace memories, preserve legacies and document lives of communities, casting their lenses on urgent realities advocating against forced erasure. At a time when histories and identities across the region are increasingly threatened by conflict, displacement, and rapid transformation, the ADPP Alumni Fellowship creates space for photographers to explore their work with renewed curiosity and ambition.
More than supporting the production of new work, the Fellowship gives photographers room to experiment, collaborate, and try new creative forms, pushing documentary photography further as a tool for memory, dialogue, and cultural preservation.
The new Fellows were selected by 2026 jurors artist and researcher Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh and photographer Eric Gottesman. Following the jury deliberations, the jurors issued the below statement, summing up their impressions on the submissions:
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It was a great pleasure to review this year’s applications together.
We recognize how difficult it is to secure support in a shrinking funding ecosystem—especially in a region where resources are limited, yet urgent narratives must be told.
The pool of projects we reviewed was incredibly dynamic and expansive. To those who were not selected for the fellowship this year: While we know how hard rejections can be in such a tight-knit community, your proposals reflected a breadth of emotional, artistic, and socio-political awareness that is a testament to the community we have built together over many years. It is our hope as a jury that this depth of exploration continues in the work of the many brilliant people within this community.
Every submitted project could have utilized these resources — financial and otherwise — to create a meaningful artistic and social impact. The projects selected this year largely came from photographers who are operating outside of other support structures, and whose work experiments with both form and content across the geography of the program. We are excited that these photographers will be able to build new bodies of work with reach throughout the region.
The jury specifically looked for projects that treated form as a site of experimentation. This year, a significant number of candidates applied to make photo books. While we love photobooks, we prioritized applications that imagined alternative forms of production and distribution over traditional books.
Meet this year’s Fellows:
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Algerian photographer Fethi Sahraoui’s Saha Omar is a deeply personal journey through memory, psychiatry, borders, family histories, and the lingering echoes of colonial violence in contemporary Algeria.
Between the Niles by Muhammad Salah from Sudan is a decade-long autobiographical archive tracing life across Khartoum, Bahri, and Omdurman resulting in a photobook produced with analogue archives.
Palestinian photographer Roba Alfaraouna’s Following the Sound traces how the songs of Bedouin women carry memory, place, and histories that photographs alone cannot fully reveal.
From Egypt, Doaa Nasr’s project Defining Moments of My Father's Life is a daughter's photographic tribute preserving the dreams, labour, laughter, and legacy of the father she refuses to let disappear.
Another Fellowship project from Egypt, Ahmed Qabel’s The Land documents farmers in the Nile Delta as their land shifts from a source of life to the margins of a rapidly changing country.
From Lebanon, Rawan Mazeh’s project Off the Map: On Erasure and Return in South Lebanon builds an urgent visual record of border communities where destruction, displacement, and memory resist erasure.
Produced by AFAC in partnership with Magnum Foundation, the ADPP Alumni Fellowship program offers the program’s alumni photographers a space to experiment, collaborate and imagine what is next.
For more information about the Fellows’ ADPP projects, check out the ADPP website.