The 12th Siena Awards Photo Festival runs from 10 October to 29 November 2026, with five major solo exhibitions, a day of talks and winners drawn from more than 40,000 entries across 163 countries.
If you’re planning an autumn trip to Italy, the Siena Awards Photo Festival is a good reason to head to Tuscany. The twelfth edition opens on Saturday 10 October and runs until 29 November, turning the city of Siena and the surrounding area into a festival of exhibitions, talks, screenings and awards.
This year’s festival has drawn more than 40,000 photographs from 163 countries across its three international competitions, and the line-up of solo shows is impressive, headed by a major James Nachtwey retrospective.
SIPA Talks and opening
Things get under way on Friday 9 October at 3pm at the Teatro dei Rinnovati with the SIPA Talks, a day of discussions, retrospectives and screenings. Speakers include Carol Guzy, Andrew Harnik, George Steinmetz, Florian Ledoux, Jasper Doest, Cheraine Collette, Joel Marklund, Dean Mouhtaropoulos, Adam Pretty, Lys Arango, and Juan Carlos and Sandra Hernandez.
The same day, Saher Alghorra’s Enduring Food Deprivation, winner of the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography, will be installed in the great central arch of the Logge del Papa.
The opening and awards ceremony follows on Saturday 10 October at 4.30pm, also at the Teatro dei Rinnovati, where the winners of the Siena International Photo Awards, the Creative Photo Awards and the Drone Photo Awards will be announced. The winning images go on show in three exhibitions: People Sharing all the World at the former Distilleria Lo Stellino, I Wonder If You Can at the Liceo Artistico “Duccio di Buoninsegna”, and Above Us Only Sky at the Museo di Storia Naturale.
The solo exhibitions
- James Nachtwey – Witness to Our Time, Centro Culturale “La Tinaia”, Sovicille
- Cinzia Canneri – Women’s Bodies as Battlefields, Accademia dei Rozzi. Canneri won the 2025 World Press Photo Award in the Long-Term Projects Africa category for this work on the war in Tigray.
- Jasper Doest – Meet Bobby, Museo di Storia Naturale, the story of a Caribbean flamingo rescued after a serious accident that became a symbol of conservation in Curaçao
- Pierpaolo Mittica – Chernobyl: Memory of a Disaster, Area Verde Camollia 85, marking 40 years since the explosion of reactor number four
- Uğur Gallenkuş – Parallel Universes, Museo del Paesaggio, Castelnuovo Berardenga, 50 digital collages setting war and humanitarian crises against everyday life in more fortunate societies
There’s also Fractures – Between Two Silences, a project that turns the historic centre of Sovicille into an open-air exhibition, with images set into walled-up doors, closed windows and ancient archways.
Our take
Siena has built a reputation as one of Europe’s most ambitious photo festivals, and this year’s programme leans heavily into documentary and photojournalism. The Nachtwey retrospective alone would be worth the trip, but the way the festival uses the city itself, from the Logge del Papa to Sovicille’s bricked-up doorways, is what makes it different from seeing the work in a gallery.
Siena Awards Photo Festival 2026 dates and tickets
The Siena Awards Photo Festival runs from 10 October to 29 November 2026 at venues across Siena and the surrounding area. Places at the SIPA Talks and the encounter with James Nachtwey are limited and require registration, but admission is free for holders of a ticket to the festival’s photography exhibitions. Full details and tickets are on the Siena Awards website.
