Ligia Popławska is an artist photographer, researcher, and art historian based in Antwerp, Belgium. Working where art and ecology meet, she is drawn to natural phenomena and what remains hidden or invisible to the human eye. Her practice weaves speculative narratives that fuse the line between reality and fiction, tracing how senses, memory, emotion, and environment shape human and more-than-human worlds. Using photography, film, writing, scent, and sound, she explores the sensory threads that bind us to the living planet, weaving speculative thinking, myths, and storytelling into her practice. Her current research delves into forest ecologies, climate grief, environmental anxiety, animal perception, fading senses and interspecies communication.

           After graduating in Art History from the University of Gdansk, Popławska continued her education at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, having completed BFA and MFA in Photography with great distinction in 2020. In recent years Popławska won several prestigious awards, including 1st Prize Decade of Change Series Award 2022 by 1854 British Journal of Photography, PhMuseum Days Award (2021) and Photography Prize funded by the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp (2020). She is a laureate of .tiff 2022 and member of FUTURES Photography nominated by FOMU Fotomuseum Antwerpen. In 2022 she was a recipient of an Emerging Talent Grant from the Flemish Government for continuing her artistic research. In 2023 she was nominated for Leica Oscar Barnack Award. Ligia exhibited at Bienal’23 Fotografia do Porto (Porto, solo), ENCONTROS DA IMAGEM (Braga, solo), FOMU (Antwerp), Valerie Traan Gallery (Antwerp), De Brakke Grond (Amsterdam), Helsinki Photo Festival, InCadaques Photo Festival, among others.

            Apart of the artistic practice, Ligia Popławska works commercially as a freelance photographer, capturing crafted, atmospheric narratives for brands, designers, artists, and architects, in the field of portrait, fashion, product and interior photography.  In 2021-2023 she was a guest professor teaching photography at the Jewellery Design, Gold and Silversmithing Department, Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. She curated and wrote for a photography platform Intimate Structures. From September 2024 she is a researcher in the Art & Ecology research group at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, working on the project Whispers of the Primeval Forest (2024-2026). In between commercial and artistic projects, she is managing IN-DEPENDANCE by IBASHO, a photography gallery in Antwerp.