An experiential journey of culture and community storytelling with the Sapara people of the Ecuadorian Amazon.

Join Photographers Without Borders and the Sapara Cuya Cocha community for a life-changing storytelling experience in the Ecuadorian Amazon during a time the community gathers in gratitude for the abundance the earth and the rainforest provides. Guided by the team at Cuya Cocha Expedición en la Selva, you’ll be invited into a deeply immersive experience that will transform the way you see, listen, and tell stories.

WHAT YOU’LL EXPERIENCE

Participants will:

• Create a powerful story — blending images and words — to add to your professional or personal portfolio and to promote the work of Cuya Cocha Expedición en la Selva.

• Deepen your ethical storytelling practice, learning how to tell stories with communities, not about them.

• Learn about ethnobotany, dreams, linguistic preservation, ancestral territory, and youth empowerment from the Sapara cosmovisión.

• Experience daily life and culture in the heart of the Ecuadorian Amazon preserved by Sapara people.

IMPACT

We will be creating alongside a community tourism project created by the Sapara community of Cuya Cocha in the Ecuadorian Amazon. These immersive experiences are centered around reciprocity, adventure, and culture; breaking from mass tourism practices. In 2001, UNESCO recognized the Sapara Nation from the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazon as an “Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.” The stories and images created by Photo Expedition participants will directly support Cuya Cocha Expedición en la Selva in creating a visual archive that serves their future generations and global advocacy efforts, helping to fund linguistic preservation, territorial protection, youth empowerment programs, raise awareness, and inspire lasting change. Participants’ images will be donated to support Cuya Cocha community’s ongoing initiatives — ensuring that your work continues to make an impact long after your journey ends, and ensuring there is reciprocity embedded in the exchange.

TRIP DATES: april 14-23, 2027

COST: $5499 USD

Deadline to register: January 31, 2027

Meet your guides, Tatiana and Sani

Tatiana Lopez is a photographer, multi-media artist, and visual anthropologist from Ecuador whose projects center around the exploration of identity and belonging. As a visual storyteller and anthropologist she investigates the profound intersections of body, memory, and territory. Her long-term projects delve into Indigenous animistic practices, body-territory relations in connection with Indigeneity and well-being, and the study of human and the other-than-human relationships through dreams. Tatiana’s work embraces collaborative and experimental methodologies; she sees photography as a tool for self-representation and a means to challenge conventional visual narratives. Tatiana is a member of Diversify Photo (Up Next), Women Photograph, Photographers without Borders, and Tawna Cine. Currently, she shares her expertise in ethnographic filmmaking as an online lecturer at the Media University of Applied Sciences in Berlin, Germany.

Sani Montahuano is a Sápara filmmaker and communicator from the Ecuadorian Amazon and a member of the collective Tawna Cine. This artistic and audiovisual creation platform operates from within the Amazon to craft narratives rooted in the territories, memories, dreams, and worldviews of Amazonian peoples.
Through cinema, video art, and photography, Sani seeks to tell stories through the voices of Indigenous peoples themselves and to construct other ways of seeing, feeling, and relating to the land.
As part of Tawna, she has participated in various audiovisual and artistic projects. In 2026, she was part of Ecuador’s representation at the 61st Venice Biennale, where the collective presented the works "Llaqui" and "Kawashima", bringing Amazonian narratives shaped by the territory and their own lived experiences to the international stage.
Her work views art and cinema as tools for memory, identity, resistance, and collective creation, aiming to ensure that stories of the Amazon are told by those who inhabit and feel a deep connection to these territories.