LYNSEY ADDARIO

Presenter, 2012

“The more I photographed Muslim women, the more I was able to metaphorically strip away the burqas and hijabs, and start chipping away at the profound misconceptions that existed in other parts of the world about these women and their culture.”  —Lynsey Addario

Lynsey Addario is a documentarian of conflict and humanitarian crises reporting from some of the world’s roughest places —Darfur, the Congo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. Her work is insightful, intimate and powerful. Addario goes beyond conflict, revealing the very problems and conditions that account for so much of the world’s violence.

She has made a career of pursuing the difficult story in the most challenging of places. Addario’s work exposes the terror of self-immolation in Afghanistan, the unspeakable pain of rape survivors in the Congo, and the horror of maternal mortality in Sierra Leone. In her essay ‘Veiled Rebellion,’ Addario revealed the lives of Afghan women, whose everyday existence is a struggle against tribalism, poverty and war.

Born 1973 in Connecticut, Addario started photographing professionally in 1996 with little training. She has since photographed for The New York Times, National Geographic Magazine, Newsweek, and Time Magazine. In 2009, she was on a team that received the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. She has received many awards, including a George Soros Grant and a MacArthur Fellowship.