Arisa Haboshi (Documentary Practice & Visual Journalism ‘25) is the recipient of two grants from the 2026 Alexia Awards for her long-term project, New York Baye Falls, developed during her program at ICP. The project is a long-form documentary investigation into migration, labor, faith, and resilience within New York City’s Senegalese community. Haboshi was awarded the Alexia Vision Grant in the Student category and the Alexia Emerging Photographer Grant, sponsored by the VII Foundation, both administered through the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. These are among the most respected honors in documentary photography and visual journalism.
New York Baye Falls centers on the Baye Fall, a subgroup of the Mouride Sufi Islamic Brotherhood rooted in Senegal. The project unfolds across Canal Street in Lower Manhattan, where many Senegalese immigrants are visible as street vendors, and extends into the Bronx and Harlem neighborhoods where their daily lives and religious networks take shape. In a city where data shows that 55% of street vendors were born in Senegal, Haboshi follows individual subjects with sustained intimacy over time, building portraits that trace the community’s spiritual and economic life amid precarious legal status, limited access to decent work, and the constant threat of enforcement, while holding space for collective resilience and faith.
"I was fortunate to meet the Baye Falls-members of the Mouride Brotherhood from Senegal—on the streets of Harlem. I'm endlessly grateful to the community members who welcomed me with such generosity, allowing me to document their powerful religious rituals and the beauty of their solidarity."
A Japanese human rights researcher and photographer, Haboshi came to ICP in 2024 after a career spanning corporate marketing at Sony, a master’s degree in Sociology, Human Rights and Politics from the London School of Economics, and field research with the International Labour Organization across Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Vietnam. At ICP, she found the visual language to unite those threads into a singular body of work.
See more of Arisa Haboshi’s work on her website: arisahaboshi.photography
Images: Arisa Haboshi
Arisa Haboshi
