Pierre Kattar, Sim Chi Yin Win White House News Photographers Association Awards

Pulitzer Center grantees Pierre Kattar and Sim Chi Yin both received top awards in The White House News Photographers Association's 2016 Eyes of History: Multimedia Contest.

Kattar's film "After Nepal Quakes, Worries in the Water" for The New York Times received first place in the competition's news story category, topping three other stories from The New York Times, National Geographic and The Washington Post. The multimedia piece, which was part of Kattar's larger Pulitzer Center-supported project with journalist Rajneesh Bhandari, revealed a Nepalese fear that viral infections would spread through water among the thousands of civilians displaced from the April 2015 earthquake.

Kattar is an Emmy-awarding video journalist and documentary filmmaker who developed his observational style of filmmaking during his 10 years at The Washington Post.

Chi Yin's "Dying to Breathe" film won third place in the contest's documentary category competing alongside projects from The New York Times, National Geographic and The Washington Post. Her National Geographic film, edited by Coburn Dukehart, revealed China's true cost of gold. It explored China's mining culture and the dangers surrounding the profession. Chi Yin learned that China's deadly mining accidents may receive worldwide attention, but the country's top occupational disease, pneumoconiosis, kills three times as many miners each year. Her film was a portrait of former gold miners, scathed by the disease, waiting for death.

Chi Yin was also a finalist in the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography for a previous project on Chinese gold miners in 2013. She was on the British Journal of Photography's Ones to Watch list of photographers in 2014 and was among the Photo District News' top 30 emerging photographers in 2013.