Announcing the 2025 APA Awards AI Winners

First Place: Rubina Chadha - USA

Project description

Merging ancient beauty with future vision — these AI-generated fashion images were designed as a modern style shoot rooted in timeless inspiration. A dialogue between history and innovation, imagination and design. Where heritage meets the horizon.

Rubina Chadha is an internationally recognized mindfulness educator, creativity mentor, trauma-informed coach, and Executive Contributor at Brainz Magazine. Recently honored by the International Association of Top Professionals (IAOTP) and featured by CIO Women Leaders for her leadership in wellness and innovation in creative education, Rubina brings over a decade of experience helping high-level creatives, leaders, and professionals reset stress, unlock creative flow, and align with their inner wisdom. As the founder of Inner Design, she integrates ancient practices and modern science — blending breathwork, mindfulness, and energetic alignment — to guide individuals and organizations toward greater clarity, innovation, and fulfillment. Her upcoming book, Design Your SELF, is a transformative guide to healing, self-discovery, and designing a life that reflects your true essence.

Second Place: Anna Battista - Italy    GALLERY

Ashes & Embers: Transcultural Beauties at the End of the World
AI-generated · 2025

Project description

In a fractured, post-apocalyptic world where borders have collapsed and cultures collide in unexpected ways, beauty refuses to disappear. Ashes & Embers is a visual exploration of resilience, identity, and elegance reimagined at the edge of survival. Through a series of striking AI-generated portraits made using Midjourney, this project portrays transcultural gangs not as chaotic mobs, but as vibrant communities where fashion, memory, and legacy still matter.
Each image features models dressed in garments that tell stories of continuity amid collapse. Their outfits are an amalgam of materials and traditions: patchworked kimonos, African textiles layered over shredded silk, and armor-like pieces fashioned from scavenged metal and organic matter. These are not costumes of nostalgia, they are statements of resistance and creativity. The gangs wear their cultures not as trophies, but as shields and declarations of pride.
Among these transcultural tribes, the Platformed Order stands serene and ethereal, with genderless models clad in pastel-toned patchworked kimonos and towering platform boots, embodying grace in an industrial wasteland. Meanwhile, the Regal Rags exude raw power, merging traditional African garments with repurposed textiles into regal drapery.
The Afrofuturist Vanguards blaze forward, shimmering under holographic textiles layered with translucent plastics. Bursting with chaotic joy and fierce attitude, the Sakura Slam captures the electric energy of Japanese women's wrestling teams, with Asian models sporting technicolor kimonos, rainbow braids, and clinking accessories that turn combat into art. Graffiti darlings the Phantom Blush wear anonymity like a crown, transforming city walls into whispers of defiance, while The Wasteland Weavers wear the remnants of a broken world like armor. Dressed in recycled parachutes, rusted metal, and found objects, their braided hairstyles and flame-colored garments radiate resilience and raw beauty.
In this imagined future, style is survival. Fashion becomes a language spoken across former borders, a shared code built on fragments of the past and visions of the future. The gangs, though forged by necessity, become tribes of meaning, transcultural by design, timeless by instinct. 
Beauty in this context, is not defined by perfection or luxury, but by the will to imagine, to create, to signal meaning where others see only ruin. It’s about the ember that glows after everything else has burned.

Annita Battista. I’m a writer, freelance journalist and photojournalist, translator, and independent researcher. My work explores the intersections of art, architecture, fashion, politics, culture, science, and technology. I’m particularly drawn to photographing unusual urban spaces and moments where the human presence disrupts the cityscape to create eerie, absurd, and visually compelling compositions. I’m also passionate about photography that tells a personal story like a recent photo-essay I did entitled "Motherland – Mum as Her Hands" dedicated to my late mothe

Third Place: Stefanie Lowenstein - Sweden - Gallery

Dictators at home

Project description - AI

I tried to imagine what dictators do and look when they're at home and nobody is looking. Do they have a hobby? Do they raid the fridge at 2 am? Please follow me to visit Mr Khamenei, Mr Yong-Un and Mr Putin in their homes where they are just humans, not dictators.

I’m the creative unicorn that has been working in advertising since the good old days when everyone drove a Porsche and partied on the roof top of Hotel Martinez in Cannes. There isn’t much I haven’t seen in this business and I still love it. After working as copywriter and creative director in big and creative agencies for ages I decided to study photography because why not. A big idea is still a big idea. Today I combine my skills in conceptual thinking with my knowledge from photography. Those two got married when AI suddenly came around the corner. My brain is working in new and novel ways. AI makes it possible for me to express concepts and ideas without having to travel or needing a huge team - which is nice because I’m an introvert. Did I mention that I love dogs? Mostly I work with advertising agencies and deliver images that are indistinguishable from photography. I can create pretty much everything in the desired mood, format, light, colours and seamlessly integrate products either by training my own AI models or simply photographing them. There is a solution for everything, just ask. I’m also a language nerd and fluent in Swedish, English, German. And some French and Hebrew. Besides that I’m German by birth and the german-ness is integrated into my backbone. Meaning: I deliver on time - except if someone drives over me with a truck or I see a homeless dog that needs help. (Just kidding, I would never be held up by a truck!)