Thomas Mandl is a photographer & artist, based in Munich.
He was born in 1990 in Munich, the same year Germany was re-united. After graduating from high school and completing his civilian service, he studied geography and political science at the LMU in Munich and the SU in Stockholm. Already during his studies he started to realize photo and video projects in parallel and completed an internship at a film production company in Munich.
He founded the project what else Europe in 2016, gathering young European creatives in Venice (2016), Porto (2017) and Antwerp (2018), making it possible for European creatives to connect and dismantle boundaries together.
In 2016 he photographed and filmed a project for Leica Camera in New York and developed his passion for portrait and reportage photography. In 2017 he started to make his first own reportages in parallel to his work as a creative director and decided in 2018 to focus only on political and social photography projects.
In 2018 he went to Russia during the FIFA World Cup to tackle sexism in football through a photo reportage on female fans, published online by BBC Sport, Copa90 and printed by Shukyu magazine in Japan. The same year he was invited to speak at TEDx in Munich about his art-project One World Flag, questioning unity and national identity. This project was published internationally and exhibited in the Neue Sammlung Munich, the Goethe Institut Lagos and other occasions.
In 2019 he worked for the European Commission in Germany helping to motivate young Europeans to vote in the European Elections and the team joined forces with the Votetogether Team from Wolfgang Tillmans in Berlin.
In 2021 he created a campaign for the NGO Mission Lifeline from Germany helping rescuing refugees in the Mediteranean Sea. From 2021 he has been working with a Social Fashion Start-Up in Germany as Creative Director and Marketing Manager.
Furthermore he is working with the German help-organization ART HELPS leading creative workshops with youths and kids. He has been to Ukraine and Iraq with ART HELPS.
