Crossing Borders: Field Reports from International Women Photojournalists 

Please join the OPC and Columbia Journalism School for a panel discussion with 4 female photojournalists who are independently pursuing in-depth documentary work. We will discuss how they find stories, seek funding, shape, develop and sustain their relevant and highly regarded projects while juggling assignments from major media organizations.

Moderated by: Alice Gabriner, international photo editor, TIME magazine; and Nina Berman, photographer and associate professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. 

Panelists:

Malin Fezehai, is an Eritrean/Swedish New York-based photographer and filmmaker who travels  around the Middle East, Africa, Europe and America. Her work focuses on communities of displacement and dislocation around the world. She has filmed on the sinking islands of Kiribati, photographed underage workers in Ethiopia, and reported on the war torn lives of women in Sri Lanka. In 2014, her work on the African asylum seekers living life in detention centers in Southern Israel was a LightBox feature for TIME magazine. She has received a 2015 World Press Photo Award, the Wallis Annenberg Prize and was named one of the 30 Emerging Photographers to watch in 2015 by Photo District News. Her image depicting a Wedding of Eritrean Refugees in Israel was the first iPhone image to ever receive a World Press Photo Award.

Glenna Gordon is a documentary photographer who has been commissioned by The New York Times Magazine, Time magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, and many other outlets. She was the recipient of a World Press Award in 2015, and selected other awards include the LensCulture Grand Prize for Visual Storytelling, PX3 First Prize for Portraiture, and the PDN Annual's Project Award. Her book, Diagram of the Heart, about Muslim women and romance novels in Northern Nigeria, was chosen as one of The New York Times Magazine's best photo books of the year and received recognition in the POYi and PDN photobook of the year contests. She has worked in Africa since 2006, first as a writer and then as a photographer, and recently began new projects in Indonesia.

Kirsten Luce worked as a staff photographer at a newspaper on the US/Mexico border before moving to New York where she became a regular contributor to The New York Times. She returns to the border frequently and this work has been published in Harper's, TIME, The New York Times Magazine and others. Her aerial photos of human smuggling shot aboard Homeland Security helicopters in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas were published in Bloomberg Businessweek and named a finalist in the National Magazine Awards and named Best in Book in the Creative Review Annual. She is also a a part-time adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University.

Adriana Zehbrauskas, a Brazilian photojournalist based in Mexico, was awarded the Getty Images Instagram Award in 2015. Zehbrauskas uses Instagram to tell stories that aren’t published in traditional media outlets. Her current project, “Family Matters” uses camera-phone portraits of families living in Guerrero, Mexico’s most violent state, including the families of the 43 missing students from the Ayotzinapa teacher’s rural school.

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