Katrin Koenning

In 2019 she won the William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize, having been selected as a finalist in 2018 and 2014, when she was also awarded the People's Choice Award. The 14th edition of the Bowness Photography Prize captures the zeitgeist of contemporary Australian photography as a reflection of the broader social and political environment. Anouska Phizacklea, Director of Monash Gallery of Art, in bestowing the 2019 Award remarked that;

She has taught in a number of national and international institutions: in 2016 at Anjali Children's workshop, Angkor Photo Festival, Cambodia; at the Australian Centre for Photography Workshop Intensive; Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne (2018), Photo Kathmandu, Nepal (2018); Angkor Photo Workshops, Siem Reap Cambodia (2019); Myanmar Deitta, Yangon Myanmar (2019); University of Tasmania (2020); University of Applied Arts Vienna (2020); Pathshala South Asian Media Institute, Dhaka Bangladesh (2020); and as a lecturer in Bachelor of Arts Photography courses at RMIT University (2020) and Photography Studies College (2013–2017, 2020, 2021)

In 2016 Koenning's first book, Astres Noirs, received the Australian and New Zealand Photobook of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for both Prix Nadar and the Paris Photo/Aperture First Book Award.

In the 2011 Head On Portrait Prize Koenning won the Critics Choice Award, selected by Robert McFarlane, for her image, Sleeping Woman for which she shared with Shauna Greyerbiehl, Stephen Dupont and James Brickwood in a prize pool of over $50,000.

Koenning works in series and is globally peripatetic yet adopts "an embedded vantage point [in] an ongoing concern for documenting scarred, wounded, and transitioning landscapes.": Lake Mountain (2010 - 2018) distils into a triptych imagery from return visits over a decade to evidence the effects of the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires; The Crossing (2009 - 2017) is a long-form work in stills and video concerned with human impact on Australian ecology; Pott (2012 - 2018) details indications of post-industrial transition through places and people of Koenning's birthplace the Ruhr; Loraine and the Illusion of Illoura (2010 - 2012) documents road trips in Australia; Transit (2007–2014) featuries portraits of seated travelers lost in thought or sleep; Thirteen: Twenty Lacuna (2009–2011) uses seemingly cinematic, ambient lighting to momentarily spotlight Melbourne city pedestrians; Dear Chris (2012 - 2013) is a personal encounter with the apprehension and aftermath of suicide; the digital video Collisions (2015 - 2017) is compiled from brief fragments from mobile photo footage; Indefinitely shot between Australia, New Zealand and her native Germany over eight years, presents the condition of a geographically separated family; two series, Midnight in Prahran begun in 2012, and Four Lakes, commenced in Kolkata in 2017, are ongoing location-specific works on urban human interconnectivity; Rausch (2016 - 2018) visually interprets the experience of chronic tinnitus; and her current work Swell is concerned with Australian government interference in, and resistance to, climate activism targeting the Adani company's Carmichael Coal Mine.

In 2009 she moved from Brisbane to live and work in Melbourne, where she is represented by Reading Room Gallery.

Koenning started her teaching career in Journalism, Journalistic Investigation and Reporting at the University of Queensland in 2008 and has since presented lectures, artist talks, workshops and conference papers in Australia, Bangladesh (2017), Germany (2015, 2018, 2019), Cambodia (2017), New Zealand (2018), and elsewhere.

Koenning took up photography after the death in a plane crash of a close friend. During 2007 to 2008 she was Picture Editor for Picturing Human Rights and Tell My Story, publications of the Australian PhotoJournalist Magazine and in 2009 to 2010 Editor of their Silent Screams: Rights of the Child. Koenning's photo essays have been published in newspapers and magazines, including The New Yorker, FT Magazine, British Journal of Photography, The Guardian,Human Rights Defender, The New York Times, Der Spiegel, The Independent, and SBS Australia.

Koenning was born and grew up in Bochum, a city in North Rhine-Westphalia where she was educated in Steiner school and hiked with the Deutscher Alpenverein youth program. In 2002, aged twenty-five, she moved to Australia where her father and aunt had emigrated in the late 1990s. She studied documentary photography, gaining a Bachelor of Photography with High Distinction at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, Brisbane, during which she achieved Academic Excellence Awards in 2004 and 2006, and which she completed in 2007.

Katrin Koenning (born 1978) is a German-born Australian photographer, photojournalist and videographer whose work has been exhibited and published since 2007.