The ANNA Award is back! After a great debut in 2022, this year saw 743 applications from 38 countries. This award aims to discover, recognize, and nurture new women-identifying artists from Africa and its diaspora.
The selection committee—Swakara Atwell-Bennett, Lezanne Human, Ruzy Rusike, and Key Jo Lee—has picked 12 finalists. The winner will get R100,000, a residency program with SAFFCA, a presentation at the 2025 RMB Latitudes Art Fair, a profile on Latitudes Online, and a year’s supply of ANNA products. The big announcement will be on Wednesday, August 7, to celebrate Women’s Month.
Check out the top 12 finalists below. Vote for your favourite and you could win a Latitudes Limited Olivié Keck print!
The Top 12 Finalists:
Ethel Aanyu (Uganda)
Ethel Aanyu is a photographer from Kampala, Uganda. She uses digital layering techniques with black and white images and coloured inverted images. Her work often features herself as a model, staging scenes that show visual self-reflections.
Yaknoabasi Jessicah Ene (Nigeria)
Yaknoabasi’s art explores sisterhood, women’s empowerment, and the divine feminine. Inspired by her female family, her work highlights women’s roles and the challenges they face. Her art is a vision of unity and strength in sisterhood, celebrating the divine feminine’s grace and power.
Marie Aimée Fattouche (Egypt)
Marie Aimée Fattouche’s art is inspired by mechanics—mental, bodily, or environmental. She explores areas of uncertainty and transformation, influenced by her Egyptian roots and Eastern perceptions of space. Her work questions collective narratives, femininity, and power mechanisms.
Kay-Leigh Fisher (South Africa)
Kay-Leigh Fisher is a visual artist, curator, and publisher in Johannesburg. Her work focuses on themes of identity, using familiar objects to explore racial and gendered identities. She received the Bag Factory Artist Studios Young Womxn Studio Bursary and works with the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation.
Leah Rachel Hawker (South Africa)
Leah Rachel Hawker is a South African artist fascinated by gender roles and the human condition. She has worked with thousands of individuals over the past 20 years, bringing her observations of human behaviour to her art. She’s currently working on her first solo show and a yearlong documentary photo story.
Xanthe Scout Lardner-Burke (South Africa)
Xanthe Scout Lardner-Burke is an artist, curator, and writer from South Africa. Her process-based practice explores materials, structures, language, and value production. She curated her first project in 2024 and has exhibited with 99 Loop Gallery and the Investec Cape Town Art Fair.
Isabella Maake (South Africa)
Isabella Maake is a contemporary visual artist from South Africa. Living with profound hearing loss, she uses art to explore identity, dualism, and vulnerability. Her work often features portraiture and figurative art, inspired by the concept of ‘in-betweenness’.
Ntsako Nkuna (South Africa)
Ntsako Nkuna’s interdisciplinary practice involves screen-printed 3D renders and metallic frames. Her work explores how architectural structures influence human interactions. She merges digital and physical mediums, influenced by her exposure to virtual spatiality through the internet and video games.
Lee-Ann Olwage (South Africa)
Lee-Ann Olwage is a visual storyteller from South Africa. She uses collaborative storytelling to explore gender and identity. Her work, featured in major publications, aims to celebrate and affirm the people she collaborates with.
Silindokuhle Shandu (South Africa)
Silindokuhle Shandu is an artist from Johannesburg. Her work reflects her upbringing in a small mining town and her experiences across urban, suburban, and rural South Africa. Her art explores womanhood, human existence, and industrial landscapes.
Xanthe Somers (Zimbabwe)
Xanthe Somers is a ceramic sculptor from Harare, Zimbabwe. Her work reimagines everyday life and challenges ideas of normalcy, beauty, and refinement. She recently completed a residency with Southern Guild in Cape Town.
Jana Visser (South Africa)
Jana Visser is a textile artist and handweaver from Stellenbosch, South Africa. Her work explores the logic of reciprocity and becoming through weaving. She navigates between controlling methods and media, exploring relationships between matter, time, and space.
* Remember to vote for your favourite here and stand a chance to win a Limited Olivié Keck print!
