Open Society Documentary Photography Project Announces 2010 Audience Engagement Grant Winners

The Open Society Documentary Photography Project announces the recipients of the 2010 Audience Engagement Grant competition. The goal of the grant program is to support innovative projects that use existing bodies of photographic work to actively engage audiences on human rights and social justice issues. Projects should include a partnership between individuals and organizations that combines expertise in documentary photography with experience working on the topic or community the project addresses. Projects must be designed in a way that will resonate with the target audience, encourage community engagement, and have a meaningful and lasting impact on the communities or issues addressed in the images.

2010 Audience Engagement Grantees

• Andrew Agaba: to partner with Africa Leadership Institute on “KALISOLISO: The People are Watching,” a newspaper supplement, poster campaign, touring exhibition, and blog designed to prevent pre- and post-election violence in Uganda in the February 2011 general elections.
• Alit Ambara: to partner with Institut Sejarah Sosial Indonesia (ISSI) to present photographs of the victims of the 1965–66 violence in an interactive, multimedia teaching module to be used in Indonesian high school history classes.
• Donna De Cesare: to partner with Universidad Centroamericana and the The Mesoamerica Center to combine photography, theater, and skills-based media workshops for youth to address the complex ways that gang violence and migration impact the human rights of young people in Central America. 
• Kunda Dixit: to partner with Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya on Shanti Sangralaya, an educational curriculum and permanent exhibition of photographs, texts, maps, and graphics about the 1996–2006 insurgency in Nepal. 
• Stephen Ferry: to partner with Consejo de Redación to create Violentología: Un manual del conflicto colombiano, a visual resource that will be distributed to journalists, editors, and archivists to to instruct and encourage the photographic coverage of Colombia's human rights crisis.  
• FIERCE: to partner with Marvin Taylor on Queer Pier: 40 Years, an exhibition and community archiving project that will serve as a tool for FIERCE’s ongoing grassroots organizing and leadership development programs for LGBTQ youth of color in New York City.  
• Lorena Ros: to partner with La Fundación Vicki Bernadet to use Unspoken—a book and multimedia project on adult survivors of child sexual abuse—to create an experiential workshop designed to raise awareness and reach out to women survivors in the Spanish prison system.  
• Jean-Marie Simon: to partner with Oficina de Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado de Guatemala and Estudio A2 to create a newspaper supplement and a multi-lingual DVD based on her book Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny, which documents the height of Guatemala’s civil war in the 1980s.