Nuanu Creative City announces FOTO Bali Festival: A New International Photography Festival Celebrating Life Through the Lens

Nuanu Creative City is set to launch one of Bali’s most exciting cultural events of the year: FOTO Bali Festival, an international photography festival dedicated to exploring the power of visual storytelling. Taking place from 26 July to 17 August 2025, the 23-day festival will bring together photographers, artists, storytellers, and creative industry professionals from Indonesia and around the world. Through exhibitions, panels, and hands-on workshops, FOTO Bali Festival offers a dynamic and immersive program that invites audiences to engage with photography as a medium for reflection, conversation, and connection. The festival strengthens Bali’s growing presence as a creative hub in Southeast Asia, particularly for photography and visual culture.

Anchored by the theme ‘LIFE’ this inaugural edition invites us to reflect on the human journey - of purpose, transformation, and presence, in a rapidly changing world. The festival acts as a platform for both emerging and established practitioners to share work that speaks to this moment in time, while offering space for discovery, collaboration, and exchange.

Through still and moving images, the festival will explore how ‘LIFE’ reveals itself through countless perspectives, bathed in both radiant light and quiet shadow. Photography serves as the medium for reflection, dialogue, and celebration — frame by frame — highlighting the shared human experience beyond borders, cultures and generations.

“Photography is one of the most democratic and poetic tools of our time,” said Kelsang Dolma, Festival Director of FOTO Bali Festival. “It invites us to slow down and look more closely - to see beyond the surface and engage with the deeper textures of place, identity, and memory. In a region as layered as Indonesia, and especially here in Bali where storytelling is part of daily life, photography becomes a powerful bridge: between generations, between land and ceremony, between the local and the global. FOTO Bali Festival was created to honour that connection. We’re here not just to present work, but to help nurture a thriving lens-based ecosystem that’s still in its early stages. This is about long-term growth, meaningful dialogue, and creating space for Southeast Asia’s photographic voices to be seen and heard.”

Through both still and moving images, the festival will explore how life reveals itself across cultures and generations—through light, shadow, ritual, and everyday moments.

FOTO Bali Festival is part of Nuanu’s broader mission to incubate creativity across disciplines. Often known as an open-air museum where art, nature, and technology intersect, Nuanu is committed to supporting photography as a vital art form, alongside a range of cultural initiatives spanning from Bali to international stages like Venice. This festival also serves as a lead-up to Art & Bali 2025, the island’s first international art fair, positioning Bali as a destination for both traditional and contemporary arts in Southeast Asia.

“There’s an incredible well of photographic talent in Bali and across the region,” Dolma added.

“We’re excited to see what the Open Call brings forward. If you have a strong visual voice and a deep commitment to the craft, we invite you to be part of this inaugural edition.”

Open Call applications will run from 2–31 May 2025. Full programming details and curator announcements will be released in the weeks ahead.

PHOTO CREDIT: Nuanu Creative City