Anna Boyiazis Receives Highly Commended Recognition At 61st Wildlife Photographer Of The Year 2025
October 15, 2025 | Source: Monroe Gallery of Photography
Via Natural History Museum in London
October 15, 2025
Wildlife Photographer of the Year at The Natural History Museum in London celebrates the extraordinary life with which we share this planet, while illuminating some of the urgent threats it faces. On exhibit October 17, 2025 to July 12, 2026.
Anna Boyiazis (USA) documents this low-tide scene of seaweed farmers tending to their underwater farm on the Zanzibar coast.
Seaweed farmers Maua Mkubwa (standing) and Maua Mdogo nurture their undersea garden in the Indian Ocean off Paje, Zanzibar, within the Menai Bay Conservation Area, the archipelago’s largest marine-protected area. As members of the women-led, community-based Mwani (Swahili for seaweed) Zanzibar co-operative, they sustainably harvest a red alga in the genus Eucheuma, known as eucheumatoid seaweeds. These are used to create handmade skincare for international markets.
This recent initiative is empowering local women and improving the livelihoods of families traditionally reliant on fishing — now facing depleted stocks due to climate change, overfishing and destructive practices. Seaweed cultivation also has environmental benefits: the fronds absorb carbon dioxide in photosynthesis and take up nitrogen and phosphorus, and act as a water purifier by reducing acidification and removing some pollutants. All this, while providing precious habitat for marine life.
Anna is a documentary photographer based between Southern California, USA, and East Africa. Her areas of focus include conservation, human rights, public health and women and girls’ issues. Her ongoing project Finding Freedom in the Water, which was first published by National Geographic, documents women and girls in Zanzibar learning to swim – an act of emancipation. Anna is a contributing photographer for GEO, National Geographic and The New York Times Magazine. She has an MFA from the Yale School of Art and a BA from the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture.