Objectifs Photo Fellowship 2026
The Objectifs Photo Fellowship aims to support Southeast Asian photographers and visual artists who have a creative documentary practice. Unfolding over six months, the fellowship comprises an online mentorship, sharing sessions and seminars, and peer discussions. It will culminate in an in-person photo intensive in April 2027, where fellows’ projects will be showcased in a slideshow evening as part of the inaugural Singapore Documentary Festival.
The fellows for the inaugural edition are:
Jessada Chan-yaem
Thailand
Jessada Chan-yaem (b. 2000) is a trans-nonbinary filmmaker and visual artist from Kamphaeng Phet, Thailand. They are currently based in Bangkok. Jessada graduated with a degree in Film Studies from the Faculty of Digital Media and Cinematic Arts at Bangkok University.
Jessada's practice spans filmmaking, moving image, photography, performance and writing. Through these mediums, they continuously experiment with expanding the possibilities of cinema and the medium they use to explore. Their work explores themes of queer identity, dreams, memories of their hometown, local folklore, migration, and politics, often intertwining personal narratives with local histories and lived experiences.
JL Javier
The Philippines
JL Javier is a Filipino photographer and visual artist based in Manila with experience in documentary photography, photojournalism, and portraiture. His work, grounded in realism, explores the tension between violence and tenderness.
His editorial work has been published in several Philippine publications such as The Philippine STAR, Vogue, and Rolling Stone. He was the former staff photographer of CNN Philippines’ digital lifestyle, culture, and politics section Life from 2016 to 2024. His photographs and other image-based work have been included in group exhibitions in galleries and museums in the country.
Currently, he is a member and co-founder of Flint Photo Collective. As JL pursues documentary, editorial, and commercial assignments, he continues to work on long-term personal projects.
Ri
Myanmar
Ri is a lens-based artist based in Myanmar. Their work focuses on stories within the queer community, intimate relationships, and narratives connected to their country’s complex political landscape.Their projects have been presented internationally, including at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (2019), the Jakarta International Photo Festival (2021), the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2022), Verzasca Foto Festival, Switzerland (2023), the Asian Art Biennale, Taiwan (2024), the Thailand Biennale (2024), the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (2025), and Chobi Mela, Dhaka (2026).
They are an alum of the Angkor Photo Festival (2019) and the South Asia Incubator Program at Photo Kathmandu (2025), as well as a participant in the World Press Photo Foundation’s Joop Swart Masterclass (2024).
Ryan Andrew
Indonesia
Ryan Andrew is a visual artist and photographer based in Jakarta, Indonesia. His practice blends documentary sensitivity with artistic interpretation to explore identity, intimacy, and belonging through collaborative portraiture. Working closely with his subjects, he creates images that reveal resilience, vulnerability, and the emotional complexities of lived experience.
Grounded in personal experience, Andrew’s work uncovers layered human narratives that resonate beyond the individual, connecting intimate stories to broader social and cultural questions.
Sereyrath Mech
Cambodia
Sereyrath Mech (b. 1993) is an emerging Cambodian visual storyteller whose practice spans photography, documentary film, and multimedia art. Driven by a long-standing interest in environmental issues and social narratives, she uses visual storytelling to uncover overlooked relationships between people, place, and ecology. Her projects include Contemporary Breath, on air pollution in Phnom Penh; Wat Bo Primary School, documenting an exemplary school in Siem Reap; Element, exploring the relationship between forests and the Mekong River; Market to Supermarket, examining changing consumption; My Neighboring Space; and When the Sun Reaches the River, exhibited at the Hong Kong International Photo Festival (2023) and the Phnom Penh Photo Festival (2024). Alongside photography, she has pursued documentary filmmaking since university, producing films including Gelombang (2019), The Stop (2022), and The Expired Film (2023) and Gone Yet Alive (2025).
Thạch Hiếu
Vietnam
Thạch Hiếu (b. 2000) is a freelance photographer who lives and works in Hanoi. Hiếu’s practice focuses on self-observation as a working method through which he explores the dynamics between people and place, often grounded in Hà Nội’s cultural, societal, and physical landscapes. His works become ongoing inquiries into his positionality and shifting beliefs, which often exist in tension with one another within contemporary societal systems.
Alongside photography, Hiếu is also interested in installation art. He experiments with everyday materials, using them to create mediated, object-based works that express inner conflicts and contradictions in relation to established beliefs, values, and societal norms.
Meet the Mentors
NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati
Co-Founder and Director of Photocircle and PhotoKTM, (Kathmandu)
NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati lives and works in Kathmandu, Nepal. She is the co-founder and artistic director of photo.circle, Nepal Picture Library and PhotoKTM – platforms and initiatives that nourish image-making, history-telling, and dialogic engagements with diverse publics. NayanTara is committed to creating possibilities for people who think, make, speak and organize in different ways to come together in “imperfect solidarity” to learn, question, disrupt, and resist and also work towards repair.
NayanTara has mentored photographers through various programs, including the PhotoKTM Southasia Incubator and the 2020 World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass. She served as Jury Chair of the 2021 World Press Photo Contest, and as a jury member of the 2022 Howard Chapnick Grant organized by the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund. From 2020- 2022, NayanTara was a Jane Lombard Fellow, at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, The New School, New York.
Wei Leng Tay
Artist (Singapore)
Artist Wei Leng Tay works across photography, video, and installation and explores constructions of identity, memory, and history through her practice. Her works draw on long-term engagements with individuals, families, and communities, and include research into photographic archives, interviews, and collaborative processes. Central to her practice is a sustained inquiry into the medium of photography through its materiality, modes of circulation, and communicative possibilities. By working at the intersection of the intimate and the structural, Tay unpacks the complexities of belonging, displacement, and the politics of representation, bringing attention to what it means to be human within today’s shifting political and cultural contexts.
Tay’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at National Gallery Singapore; ARTER Space for Art, Turkey; Daegu Photo Biennale, South Korea; Asian Art Biennial, Taiwan; and is in collections including the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Singapore Art Museum, and Morgan Stanley Art Collection. Tay received the Alexander Tutsek Photography Grant, Munich (2025), Wyng Foundation WMA Prize, Hong Kong (2017), and was a Yale University Poynter Fellow, New Haven (2015). Tay has also worked in journalism. She was previously Deputy Picture Editor of TIME Magazine’s Asia Edition, and a Photo Editor for Bloomberg in the Asia Pacific region, assigning photographers and researching archives for award-winning stories and packages. She was most recently a lecturer of art practice at Yale-NUS College and remains invested in teaching as a form of knowledge exchange and artistic inquiry.