We are delighted to announce the recipient and runners-up of the 2026 Flickr x Black Women Photographers grant! For the first time ever, this year’s recipient was announced live on stage at MODE, our inaugural photography festival in Minneapolis. Now in its fourth year, this is our biggest grant yet: $10,000 to help one photographer who is part of both Black Women Photographers and Flickr further their photography practice, along with a two-year Flickr Pro membership and a one-year SmugMug Pro membership. Plus, ten more talented individuals receive a one-year Flickr Pro membership and a one-year SmugMug Pro membership!
As part of their grant application, participants were asked to share a photo that aligns with the theme “Traces of Connection.” This theme was chosen by Éléonore Menga, our 2025 grant recipient and this year’s guest judge. The photos submitted explored the many ways connection lingers, in gestures, in landscapes, and in the quiet spaces people leave behind. Please join us in celebrating these amazing photographers and the Black Women Photographers community.
Grant Recipient: Nyancho NwaNri – “Of Grace and Concrete”
Congratulations to Nyancho NwaNri, the recipient of this year’s $10,000 grant!Nyancho is a Nigerian-Gambian visual artist, documentarian, researcher, and National Geographic Explorer. Through long-term, research-driven projects built on community knowledge and deep relationships, she explores where Indigenous African spiritual traditions, culture, and history meet memory, the self, and the natural world. She’s also passionate about education, leading workshops and mentorship programs in film and photography for emerging storytellers across Africa and beyond. Her work has earned her the Reuters Yannis Behrakis Photojournalism Grant, a Reuters Journalists of the Year nomination, and residencies at the Cité des Arts in Paris and the Goethe-Institut Vila Sul in Salvador, Brazil.
In her submission for “Traces of Connection,” Nyancho wrote: “Five young ballerinas stand on a weathered concrete platform, drawn toward the same unseen point. One rises onto pointe, another’s hand is already there to hold her…gently. They wear white tutus and Ankara headwraps, two worlds carried as one. Behind them, a building holds its silence. Broken glass, faded walls, the quiet residue of years. Grass pushes through the concrete anyway. The persistence of life. Amongst these girls, trust has become instinct, rehearsed until it needs no asking. They bring softness to the jaggedness of the landscape. And for an instant, drawn in, I stopped being outside the frame and became part of the moment. Connection, it turns out, doesn’t end where the picture does. It reaches beyond the frame to whoever pauses long enough to see it.”
On receiving the grant Nyancho shared, “I’m honoured to be the winner of the BWP x Flickr grant. The prize money will be tremendously valuable in supporting my practice, allowing me to undertake professional development activities and dedicate more time and focus to my upcoming projects.”
Beyond the financial support, the connection with the BWP community is a priceless opportunity for growth, exchange and connection, in the company of other independent Black women photographers like myself.
Up next, Nyancho is laying the foundations for a Brazil–Nigeria project exploring how Indigenous and Afro-descendant cultures and spiritual traditions can inform more holistic, regenerative approaches to today’s environmental challenges. The project centers on these communities’ deep relationships with the natural world and asks how their knowledge systems might help us rethink sustainability.
2026 Flickr x BWP Grant Runners-up
So many amazing photos were submitted for the Flickr x BWP Grant. Here’s our ten runners-up! Check out the photos below then follow along on our Instagram this week as we share the stories behind each.
Trena Raines– “Lineage”
Kasara-Emma Napoleon – “Traces of Connection”
Kemi Taiwo – “Communal Living II”
Marissa McDowell – “Traces of Connection”
Melissa Alexander – “Making Room – Uterine Fibroids”
Iyesogie Ogieriakhi – “Home”
Erika Joseph – “Keep Your Head Up”
Stacy-Ann Ellis – “Neighborhood Barber Pt 2”
Heather Lynch – “Ubuntu”
Delilah Williams – “Traces of Connection”
Congratulations again to Nyancho and to all ten runners-up. Every submission showed us a different way connection is seen through your lenses, and we’re so grateful to everyone who shared their work with us.
A huge thank you to Polly Irungu, Éléonore Menga, Genesis Falls, Edwina Hay, Black Women Photographers, and our very own Flickr Community team, whose shared commitment to uplifting underrepresented artists helps make space for stories that matter.
And thank you to MODE by Flickr for making our first in-person announcement possible! Sharing this moment live on stage in Minneapolis, surrounded by the community that makes this grant what it is, was something special.
We can’t wait to see what Nyancho creates next, and we hope you’ll join us in following along with the incredible photographers of the Black Women Photographers community on Flickr.
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