Maria Guțu

Maria Guțu (b. 1996, Republic of Moldova) grew up in the north of the country, raised in large part by her grandparents while her parents worked abroad — a common experience in Moldova that later became the point of departure for her photographic work. In 2020 she graduated in cinematography from the Academy of Music, Theatre and Fine Arts in Chișinău, and in 2022 she completed her studies at the Docdocdoc School of Modern Photography in Saint Petersburg.

She works primarily in documentary photography, shooting almost exclusively on black and white film. Her long-term project Homeland (2019–2023), photographed in the villages of northern Moldova, portrays children and teenagers within the landscapes that surround them, tracing the consequences of labour emigration for families and rural communities and asking what home means in a country that many leave in search of better opportunities. Alongside photography, Guțu makes collages from her own photographs and vintage Soviet and German magazines; her other projects include Place to Disappear, a documentary study of the village of Stârcea in northern Moldova.

Her work has received sustained international recognition. In 2018 she was selected for Artpil's 30 Under 30 list of women photographers, and since 2021 she has been a member of Women Photograph. Portraits from Homeland were shortlisted at the Sony World Photography Awards in 2022 and 2023, and in 2023 and 2024 she was shortlisted for, and became one of the winners of, Portrait of Humanity by the British Journal of Photography. In 2019 she received a grant from the Centre of Documentary Photography (CDFD) in Bucharest, and in 2023 a mentorship grant from the VID Foundation for Photography. In 2024 she was nominated by Fotofestiwal Łódź to the European talent platform Futures, and the same year she won the Leica Oskar Barnack Newcomer Award for Homeland, presented at a ceremony in Wetzlar in October 2024 with a prize of 10,000 euros and a Leica Q3 camera.

Following the award, Homeland was shown at the Ernst Leitz Museum in Wetzlar alongside the main-prize series and the LOBA 2024 shortlist, before touring Leica galleries internationally, with solo exhibitions at Leica Store & Gallery Boston (November 2025 – January 2026) and Leica Gallery New York (January–February 2026). In 2025 Galeria Lutnița in Chișinău presented a solo exhibition of her analogue photography, curated by Yev Kravt, and she participated in the sixth edition of the Art Encounters Biennial in Timișoara, Bounding Histories. Whispering Tales, curated by Ana Janevski and Tevž Logar. She has also taken part in group exhibitions in Romania, Germany, the United Kingdom, Hungary, France and the United States.

Guțu lives and works in Glodeni, a town in the north of the Republic of Moldova.