Andréa Olga Mantovani

A geographer by training, Andrea Olga Mantovani (born in 1985, lives and works in Paris) worked for 6 years in Europe on environmental and social issues. Seeing in the image an indispensable instrument of testimony, she devoted herself to photography professionally in 2015 and then joined the Hans Lucas studio. She has since devoted herself to long-term projects alternating between commissioned work for the New York Times and personal projects.

His personal work today focuses on the protection of natural forests in Eastern Europe, using photography as a militant artistic act. In her approach, the photographer alternates landscape images celebrating the strength and beauty of an unchanging nature and more allegorical photographs. It refers to the complexity of the environmental crisis and metaphorically evokes certain aspects of the environmental challenges of our society.

She is the winner of the Emerging Talent Prize of the Festival de la Gacilly 2018, the Obs Prize "Les Femmes S'Exposent" and the Focale Prize for her work on the Bialowieza forest. She opens a new photographic opus in the forest massif of the Carpathians in Ukraine, in the grip of deforestation, with the support of the National Commission of Plastic Arts.