Lagos Ballet Frame Wins Flickr x BWP Grant, Now at $10,000

The Flickr x Black Women Photographers grant hit $10,000 this cycle, its fourth and largest award, going to Lagos documentary photographer Nyancho NwaNri for "Of Grace and Concrete." The prize has doubled repeatedly since launching at $1,200 in 2022, and this year's package adds a two-year Flickr Pro membership and a one-year SmugMug Pro membership, with ten runners-up receiving one-year memberships from both platforms.

NwaNri's winning frame shows five young ballerinas on a weathered concrete platform in white tutus and Ankara headwraps, one rising onto pointe while another steadies her. The dancers attended the Leap of Dance Academy, a free ballet school in the Ajangbadi area of Lagos that drew international attention in June 2020 when video of 11-year-old Anthony Mmesoma Madu dancing barefoot in the rain went viral. "I don't know if you ever saw this story about this boy dancing ballet in Lagos," NwaNri said. "It went viral. So I went there to photograph the school."

She shot a real lesson indoors first — "None of that was staged" — then asked the students where else they wanted to be photographed. The children led her to the platform. In Nigeria, she noted, ballet usually reads as foreign, "reserved for people that have the money to be able to afford it," which made the setting part of the story. Applicants for the grant submitted one photograph plus a short statement on the theme "Traces of Connection," chosen by 2025 winner Éléonore Menga.

What does the money actually buy?

The grant carries no spending restrictions, which BWP founder Polly Irungu endorses. "At the end of the day, creatives know what they need best," she said. "Financial support can be that difference between simply sustaining a practice and truly investing in it." Raising the award to $10,000, in her words, shows "what it looks like to actually put your money where your mouth is" — a pointed remark in a year when, as she acknowledged, "people have walked back on their DEI commitments."

NwaNri plans to spend it on professional development courses including creative direction, gear updates, a website redesign, and new projects — she usually self-funds her work. She spoke from Brazil, where she's preparing a project linking Brazil and Nigeria, two countries she calls "very distant sisters," connected by the transatlantic slave trade and, less romantically, some of the highest deforestation rates on their continents. The project asks how Indigenous and Afro-descendant cultures' relationship with nature might inform environmental responses. She also wants to rebalance toward installation video art without abandoning documentary.

How BWP converts visibility into invoices

Irungu founded BWP in 2020 as a hireable directory for photo editors and art buyers; it now counts more than 2,100 photographers in over 60 countries, plus grants, free education, and portfolio reviews. The paid-work pipeline is concrete:

• Free portfolio reviews with the New York Times photo desk helped Lagos photographer Taiwo Aina land a front-page Times assignment about a year later; she now contributes regularly.
• Members have become Getty Images contributors after reviews with Getty editors.
• A major airline found a photographer through the directory and installed her work on boarding-area walls.
• A TrackTown USA partnership, now in its fifth season at Hayward Field in Eugene, led one early-cohort photographer — new to track — to a Nike assignment shooting Faith Kipyegon's 2025 sub-four-minute mile attempt in Paris.
• A Live Nation Urban partnership has delivered first paid concert assignments.

"I know for me in my career, all it took was one person saying yes, and it changed the trajectory of my career," Irungu said. BWP members also get free Capture One and Adobe software and business training — contracts included.

On judging and persistence

What separates a winning application? "We really look for compelling storytelling first and foremost," Irungu said, with judges weighing "originality, authenticity, emotional resonance and a clear point of view." Strong technical execution matters, but the memorable work wins. For the first time, Flickr announced the winner in person, onstage at the inaugural MODE by Flickr festival in Minneapolis, September 18-20, with past winners Menga and Genesis Falls judging.

Irungu, who became the first photo editor in the office of Vice President Kamala Harris after a path that ran through The Intercept fellowship and, briefly, a job at Sonic, reports BWP has distributed more than $230,000 in grants and $80,000 in camera equipment to date. Within five years she wants those figures above $1 million and $300,000, plus support for members working as directors and cinematographers. "My goal and just my hope is just to leave the industry better than I found it," she said — with a parting nudge to any editor reading: "Let me give somebody a yes today."