Daily News
From Home Furnishing Business
Six Photographers Find Mentorship with Annie Leibovitz and IKEA
November 7,
2023 by HFBusiness Staff in Business Strategy, Designer Weekly, Industry 
After a competitive global open call in June, Annie Leibovitz and Marcus Engman, creative director at Ingka Group (IKEA Retail) made the final selection together. The final six mentees submitted work that showed their creativity and unique perspective on life at home, as well as their aspirations to pursue careers as photographers.
The six mentees are:
Ka’Vozia Glynn, 22, United States
Zélie Hallosserie, 19, France
Praise Hassan, 23, Nigeria
Toma Hurduc, 21, Romania
Elena Kalinichenko, 25, Ukraine
Trâm Nguyen Quang, 23, Netherlands
The six mentees will be mentored by Annie Leibovitz and the Annie Leibovitz Studio team, together with Marcus Engman and other IKEA representatives. Their assignment will be to take portraits, interpreting insights from the annual IKEA Life at Home Report through their camera lens, the same assignment which Leibovitz has worked on for IKEA. The six mentees’ work will be shown alongside Leibovitz’s at the culmination of the collaboration in early 2024.
Speaking about the program Leibovitz said: “When I was at art school, our work would be critiqued by the teachers. But I found that the discussions and learnings among the students were just as beneficial to us. I think the mentees in this program will learn greatly from each other.”
Marcus said, “At IKEA we care about people and their life at home. We are always looking for new perspectives, and new voices to lift to the fore. The six final mentees that we chose showed passion and potential in their creative vision and their unique takes on what life at home means to them.”
“In fact, we had originally planned to only select five mentees but the breadth of the talent and the opportunity to see life through even more lenses made it impossible to choose just five.”