2026 LUCIE FOUNDATION
$3000 FINE ART SCHOLARSHIP

$3,000 cash prize

Joel Jimenez Jara, Glimmers, Feathers and Staring Skies

“Glimmers, feathers and staring skies” explores the hummingbird as a migratory body moving between science and myth, earthly and celestial. Emerging from my father’s death and the Costa Rican folk belief that hummingbirds are able to carry the souls of the dead, the project approaches the hummingbird as a mediating body between human memory and the more-than-human world. Combining family, colonial and ornithological archives, I examine how photography has attempted to capture, verify, classify and preserve a fleeting body. I will photograph hummingbirds, landscapes and infrastructures of care, asking how we construct relationships with other species in an age of ecological fragility.

The grant will support travel, photographic and printing materials, and exhibition-quality production. I will work across museum collections and living ecosystems in Europe and Costa Rica, revisiting my family archive and local landscapes.”

Website: joeljimenezr.com

• Leah Gordon, Through Smoke (Par Fumée)
• Hyunmin Ryu, Ryu Sang-Lag
• Guanyu Xu, Resident Aliens

• Persia Campbell, Reminiscences from the border
• Mohammad Rakibul Hasan, The Blue Fig
• Shubhadeep Mukherjee, Smells Like Home
• Christopher Perez, DOMINICAN
• Aline Smithson, Japonisme: Fireworks and Cherry Blossoms

2026 LUCIE FOUNDATION
$1000 FINE ART SCHOLARSHIP

$1,000 cash prize

Ammar Yassir, I Will Never Find Home

I Will Never Find Home is an ongoing autobiographical project that traces my personal journey of displacement, which began following the outbreak of the war in Sudan in April 2023. I search for a sense of home that remains out of reach through the cities I’ve passed by; I question and try to understand where I belong. As a person who was once a diaspora child, who went back to Sudan, and later on I experienced displacement, refuge, and exile, I think I lost that sense of belonging a long time ago.

Instead of the stereotypical view about war, displacement, and refugees, I took a personal and observational perspective to understand the relationship between human beings and their connection with their surroundings, and how we can go through these circumstances together, but also have different experiences.

I blend documentary photography with personal archives and text to portray and translate the emotions of my family, the expressions of friends and fellow refugees, and my own lived experience of longing for a place that may no longer exist.

Website: ammaryassir.com

• Joe Cuccio, New Farmers Almanac
• Shahrzad Darafsheh, The Body That Holds: A Prologue to Photography, Trauma, and the Limits of Representation
• Joseph Ladrón de Guevara, si el sol llegara a oscurecer, y no brille más

• Ann Ellis, Chosen
• Morrison Gong, Daughters Carry the Dead
• Brynne Quinlan, Anything Worth Doing
• John Shen, Stranger In The Land
• Hanna Wolf, The Hardest Hue to Hold

2026 LUCIE FOUNDATION
$3000 FINE ART SCHOLARSHIP

$3,000 cash prize

Carlos Folgoso Sueiro, Alén do Lago

Alén do Lago (which in my local language means “Beyond the lake”) is an ongoing photo-documentary essay exploring Galicia and northern Portugal, the territory where I was born and to which I belong. Since 2020, I have photographed

landscapes and stories rooted in my own life: my grandmother’s emigration, my father’s death from alcoholism, and the social exclusion experienced by close friends. Through these intimate fragments, I build a narrative of a land suspended

between reality and myth, memory and present, where the everyday coexists with the uncanny and the landscape preserves traces of what has happened.

These personal experiences intersect with broader forces shaping the territory: emigration, depopulation, environmental change and the erosion of rural life. Rather than documenting a disappearing world, I seek to understand how these transformations inhabit people’s lives, memories and landscapes—and my own identity.

Website: carlosfolgoso.com

• Fouad Hallak, A Mind in the Past, Eyes on Tomorrow
• Brais Lorenzo, Burned Land
• Chinky Shukla, The Mountain and the Machine

• André Luís Alves, Fata Morgana – War and Independence
• Sergio Attanasio, Black Stone
• Jamie Johnson, Growing Up Travelling: The Next Generation
• Natalia Ortiz Mantilla, It smells like rain
• Pierre Vanneste, Bargny, the Sea and the Cement: An Account of Industrialization

2026 LUCIE FOUNDATION
$1000 FINE ART SCHOLARSHIP

$1,000 cash prize + Sony Camera and Lens (model to be announced soon)

Aakash Gulzar, The Silence That Inhabits Us

The Silence That Inhabits Us (2023-Ongoing) is an evolving visual archive documenting the fragile texture of everyday life amidst prolonged socio-political uncertainty in Kashmir. Originating from a necessity to capture the valley from within, the project moves beyond dominant media narratives of spectacle and conflict, focusing on ordinary moments, shifting landscapes, and quiet continuities under pervasive surveillance. It approaches documentary practice as an accumulative act of witnessing, where sustained engagement and time become the primary methodology for recording a region in flux.

By focusing on stillness, intimacy, and presence, the work records subtle rhythms often excluded from external representations. As rapid political transformations, administrative reconfigurations, and cultural erasures reshape the region, the urgency of visual memory becomes paramount. These photographs turn toward the domestic and the peripheral, serving as both testimony and preservation, archiving the “unremarkable” before it is lost.

Instagram: @aakash__gulzar

• Lukas van Bentum, Roots Without a Name
• Louis Roth, New Order
• Michele Zousmer, HOLDING ON: WOMEN WHO REMAIN

• Manuel Almenares, Isleño.
• Hector Ruiz Cardenas, Apt. 2F
• Rory Grubb, Somewhere Else – Limbo on the Balcony of Europe
• Roberto Maccariello, Elder Brother
• Imtiaz Ahmed Nafiz, Where Garia No Longer Comes