BIO
Anastasiia Nelen is a documentary photographer based in San Francisco, CA. She has photographed in 40 countries, and her work focuses on disappearing animals, cultures, and communities. She has been a photographer for 13 years and has won numerous prestigious awards, including the Best of Russia and National Geographic Russia “Multinational Russia”. Her works have been selected for publication by media outlets such as Forbes, Elle, and Vogue. She is a member of the Russian Union of Art Photographers and the Russian Geographical Society, both leading institutions in Russia dedicated to developing and preserving cultural diversity.
Anastasiia changed the landscape of Russian tourism through works about remote regions. Her project “Gold of Tuva” received the national award “My Planet” (2019) for travel discoveries. The project has also won the Bearr Trust photo competition in London (2021). These works from the project were exhibited numerous times around Russia. She also won the Ministry of Culture’s scholarship for outstanding young figures in culture and arts to work on her project on the pandemic’s influence on remote Russian villages (2021). Her work is renowned for its emotional depth and vivid storytelling, allowing viewers to connect with her subjects deeply.
Nelen also expanded her influence abroad, shooting in more than 35 countries. Her “Morocco Kingdom’s Colors” exhibition on the Moroccan lifestyle was displayed in state museums and exhibition centers around Russia for three years (2020–2023). She has mainly been focused on portraying cultural and natural diversity, capturing a breathtaking variety of national customs, colors, and characters in her travels through Asian and European countries. Her work captures stunning visuals and provokes thoughts on disappearing diversity and the essence of photography.
She is also collaborating with Sony on nature preservation efforts connected with her project about endangered sea turtles, Loggerhead, a partnership that began in 2023. In 2024, Anastasiia received a visa for extraordinary talent in photography in the United States, was nominated for the Leica Oskar Barnack Award, and was selected as one of 100 promising photographers worldwide to participate in Eddie Adams Workshop XXXVII.