The Alexia Foundation recently announced the recipients of the 2015 Alexia Foundation Grants: Paolo Marchetti for the professional grant and Michael Santiago for the student grant.
Marchetti of Rome, Italy, will receive the $20,000 professional grant for his project “The Price of Vanity.” The work will document the brutality of the intensive breeding farms used worldwide to produce skins and furs for the high-end fashion industry. It intends to expose this cruel cultural trend driven by remorseless beauty demands.
Michael Santiago was named the student winner for his project “Stolen Land, Stolen Future.” Santiago is a senior at the San Francisco Art Institute. His project will document the lives of black farmers, who have fought to acquire and maintain land throughout the country, despite facing extreme difficulty along the way.
Learn about this year’s finalists including professional grant finalists Matt Eich, Charles Mendel, Ed Ou and Corinna Kern as well as student runner-up Rahul Talukder from the Pathshala South Asian Media Institute in Dhaka, Bangladesh, whose project “Collapse of Rana Plaza,” will follow the survivors of the Rana Plaza collapse and the dependents of those who died, on the Alexia Foundation website.