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Leica Women Foto Project 2019 Awardee
Debi Cornwall (Brown 1995, Harvard Law School 2000) is a conceptual documentary artist who returned to visual expression in 2014 after a 12-year career as a civil-rights lawyer. Her visual work examines American power and identity in the post-9/11 era. Exhaustive research and negotiation were critical to her advocacy and remain integral to her work as an artist.
Publications including Art in America Magazine, European Photography Magazine, the British Journal of Photography, Hyperallergic, and The New York Times Magazine have profiled Debi’s work. She is a 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow, a Harpo Foundation Visual Artist grantee, a Center for Emerging Visual Artists fellows, and a Duke University Archive of Documentary Arts Collection Award winner. Her last project, “Welcome to Camp America: Inside Guantánamo Bay,” has been internationally honored as both a book (Radius, 2017) and exhibition. Radius will publish her Leica Women Foto Award-supported work, Necessary Fictions, in 2020.
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Leica Women Foto Project 2019 Awardee
Yana Paskova is a Bulgaria-born, Chicago-bred, Brooklyn-based photojournalist and writer. The spark that drives her is her passion for creative visuals, science, music, climate change, the economic and political state of the world, the beauty of the written word, architecture, anthropology, and the true sense of equality. Yana lets her camera define her geography, aiming to create photographs that combine unique aesthetics with a strong narrative, style with meaning — whether in a historic context or just beyond the surface of mundanity. Yana’s clients include National Geographic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR, Getty Images, and Reuters, amongst others. She has received awards from PDN’s Photo Annual and American Photography, grants to further her projects from the Pulitzer Center, the International Women’s Media Foundation, Getty Images + Panasonic Lumix, and exhibits via ICP online and Bulgaria’s National Gallery of Art.
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Emma Raynes is the Director of Programs at the Magnum Foundation where she supports independent photographers to cover under-reported stories and imagine innovative means for distribution and engagement. She is also a member of the faculty at the International Center of Photography in NYC. Emma holds a B.A. in Art History and an M.A. in Cultural Anthropology from the New School for Social Research and received a Hine Documentary Fellowship from Duke University.
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A Guggenheim Grant Fellow and contributing photographer to National Geographic, Maggie Steber is an internationally known documentary photographer whose work has appeared in major magazines, newspapers and book anthologies as well as national and international exhibitions. She has worked in 70 countries specializing in stories concerning the human condition. Her photographs are included in the American Women Collection at the Library of Congress, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Richter Library.
Steber was named as one of 11 Women of Vision by National Geographic Magazine, Steber has worked as a picture editor for Associated Press, a contract photographer for Newsweek Magazine, and as the Director of Photography at The Miami Herald. She is a member of VII Photo Agency.
Her photographs are included in the Library of Congress, Richter Collection, and private collections.
Clients include National Geographic Magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Aperture Quarterly, Fortune, Smithsonian, People Magazine, Time Magazine, Stern of Germany, Newsweek Magazine, U.S. News and World Report, CARE, Der Spiegel, DU Magazine of Switzerland, Merian Magazine of Germany, The Independent in Britain, and French Geo, as well as many others. She teaches workshops through the Leica Akademie USA as well as at various International festivals.
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Sandra is originally from Albuquerque, NM and was raised in Cheyenne, WY. After receiving a B.A. in English from Syracuse University, Sandra spent four years working at NBC – first as a Page and then working on various news programs. From there, she became the program coordinator for the Black Filmmaker Foundation. During her time there, she held a deep commitment to helping people of color enter the film industry at various levels.
Sandra then returned to the news industry, by taking on a position at The Associated Press, where she spent eight years moving up from photo assistant to overseeing photo news coverage for Latin America and the Caribbean. She also took time to work on an advanced degree in multimedia from L’Universite Toulouse in France. Sandra was a contributing writer in the book “Unseen: Unpublished Black History from The New York Times Photo Archives.” Most recently, she was the picture editor and co-curator on the book “This Is 18.” Currently, Sandra is the Associate Director of Photography at CNN.