Jana Plavec (b. 1979 in former Czechoslovakia) Plavec is a graduate of Fotoacademie in Amsterdam. In 2015, she won Fotoacademie’s Best Portfolio. Her graduation project was a social documentary photo series about Chanov, a disadvantaged neighbourhood in the north of Bohemia. The project became a book, which was shortlisted for the Unseen Dummy Awards in 2016. In the same year, GUP Magazine named Plavec as one of the 100 emerging photography talents in the Netherlands. Plavec’s work has been exhibited in Amsterdam, Bologna, Budapest, Prague, Graz, and more. She focuses on documenting social issues and the life of minorities and other socially excluded or rejected groups and individuals, using photography as a medium to tell their stories. She studies and captures the relationship between people and their natural spaces, and the genius loci they form together in an organic way that isn’t always tied to a particular place: her travelling exhibition I, Refugee showed the 2015–2016 refugee crisis from a humanitarian volunteer’s perspective. Plavec also creates visual poetry, drawing mainly from personal and emotional experience, which is visualised in the lyricism of her photographic series. They allow her to create vast dreamscapes that rumble with the harrowing potential of finding one’s truest self; a refuge from the outer world; a self-contained solace. She's based in Prague, Czech Republic.