BRENDA ANN KENNEALLY

Presenter, 2008

Brenda Ann Kenneally is a mother, documentarian and interdisciplinary artist living in Brooklyn. Kenneally’s obsession with capturing a core truth of the people she photographs earned her The W. Eugene Smith Award in 2000 for photographers who work in the tradition of the legendary Life Magazine photographer.

Her long-term projects are intimate portraits of social issues that intersect where the personal is political.

Her book and web publication Money, Power, Respect; Pictures of My Neighborhood received numerous awards: The W. Eugene Smith Award for Humanistic Photography, a Soros Criminal Justice Fellowship and The Mother Jones Award. In 2006 the multimedia project won the Best of Photojournalism award for overall Best Use of the Web by the National Press Photographers Association.

The multimedia work that she was commissioned by The New York Times Magazine to do for the first Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, was nominated for a Pulitzer and the feature production by Media Storm won a Webb Award.

Kenneally is seeking to expand her immersion style of reporting to include the subjects of her work. Web technology has made real, the possibility for open-ended stories that allow policy makers and socially concerned citizens to put personal stories into an historical context that facilitates cultural literacy.

In this spirit Kenneally and independent producer Laura Lo Forti founded The Raw File, a digital theatre dedicated to providing a space for socially provocative media.