Awarded annually, the Eyewitness Photojournalism Grant supports projects by independent photojournalists historically underrepresented in the global media landscape.
EXPLORE WINNING PROJECTS
Tara Pixley
Immersed in Oil
Immersed in Oil documents the most affected neighborhoods, visualizing the everyday impacts of Southern California fossil fuel production and emphasizing the BIPOC communities living in petroculture precarity. The photo story is published by High Country News and accompanied by original poems written by Vickie Vértiz.
Ángela Ponce
Guardians of the Glaciers
As the climate crisis takes hold, the Quelccaya Ice Cap in Cusco, Peru melts, and the inhabitants of the communities who live on the slopes and close to the glaciers are directly impacted. They seek to protect the fragile ecosystems through ancestral knowledge and rituals of the Andean cosmovision, which over time are also disappearing due to the changing environment, which is now the main cause of population displacement.
Sofia Aldinio
Until We Are Gone
Until We Are Gone probes the haunting question of what happens to future generations when collective cultural memory is erased, and asks what critical lessons we can learn about perseverance, sustainability, and adaptation from these communities as mankind braces itself for more extreme conditions across our planet.
Sarahbeth Maney
Reclaiming Her Space: Birthing Through a Pandemic
This project follows Sophia Tupuola, a new mother and first-generation Samoan American who has been homeless since 2017. In June, photojournalist Sarahbeth Maney began documenting Tupuola's pregnancy through images and interviews for the San Francisco Chronicle.
Eli Hiller
Within Reach
This project explores how harm-reduction workers and drug dependent communities are navigating their emotions and survival amid a pandemic.
Joana Toro
Where Is Mickey Mouse?
This project documents the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on a population in the center of New York City: the costumed performers dressed as Hello Kitty, Mickey Mouse, Elmo, Batman, and other icons of the entertainment industry who pose for photographs with tourists in Times Square.
EYEWITNESS PHOTOJOURNALISM GRANTEES
Juan Arredondo
2023 WINNER
Juan Arredondo is a Colombian-American photographer and filmmaker exploring social inequality, human rights, and conflict. Arredondo’s project, The Uncounted, will take an up-close look at the challenges of recording the basic metrics of the bookends of life: birth and death. He will focus on rural regions of Colombia on the Pacific Coast, where inadequate registries are widespread, including missing documentation of Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities.
Tatsiana Chypsanava
2023 WINNER
Tatsiana Chypsanava is a photojournalist and documentary photographer based in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Born in Belarus and a descendant of the Komi peoples of the Siberian North-West Ural, she focuses on Indigenous rights, migration, and environmental issues. Chypsanava's project Te Urewera, will document the Tūhoe people's relationship with their land, their challenges, and their plans to reopen the rainforest to the public on the 10th anniversary of the government returning the former national park to its Indigenous stewards.
Nitashia Johnson
2023 WINNER
Nitashia Johnson is a multimedia artist and educator from Dallas, Texas. Her freelance photography and videography have been featured by outlets such as The New York Times, The Dallas Morning News, NBC, The Washington Post, and CNN. Johnson’s Eyewitness project, The Faces That Face, will delve into the stories of seven individuals, including herself, who have resided near the Dallas GAF roofing manufacturing facility.
Sofia Aldinio
2022 WINNER
Sofia Aldinio is an Argentine-American documentary photographer and multimedia storyteller. She is currently based between Portland, Maine, and Baja California, Mexico. Her work uses collaborative practices to tell stories about home, immigration, climate change, and preserving natural and cultural heritage through an interdisciplinary process that uses photography, archival materials, illustrations, motion, audio, and written narratives.
Tara Pixley
2022 WINNER
Tara Pixley, Ph.D., is a queer, first-generation Jamaican-American photographer, curator, and educator based in Los Angeles, where she is an assistant professor of journalism at Loyola Marymount University. She was a 2021 IWMF NextGen Fellow, a 2020 awardee in the inaugural World Press Photo Solutions Visual Journalism Initiative, and a 2016 Visiting Knight Fellow at Harvard University's Nieman Foundation for Journalism.
Ángela Ponce
2022 WINNER
Ángela Ponce is a documentary photographer and photojournalist based in Peru. She focuses on long-term projects that address Latin American political conflicts, the rights of people with disabilities, and environmental issues. Ponce has been awarded in the POY Latam Sports Series category; Women Photograph and The Women’s Equality Center grant, ICRC Humanitarian Visa d'Or, the Sony Latin American Professional Award, among others.
Eli Hiller
2021 WINNER
Eli Hiller is an independent documentary filmmaker and photographer who pursues stories that seek to humanize marginalized communities. He approaches stories with a conscious perspective on how imperialism and cultural influences have produced the realities of disenfranchised people. He is a frequent contributor to Getty Images and has also worked for Devex, BBC Reel, Zinc, and The New York Times.
Sarahbeth Maney
2021 WINNER
Sarahbeth Maney is a freelance photojournalist based in San Francisco who frequently contributes to The New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. Her work focuses on topics related to education, disability, and social issues that disproportionately impact Black and brown communities. Most recently, she covered the Black Lives Matter protests and California wildfire season, and she completed a short documentary following the first blind person to attempt to kayak independently from Asia to Europe using navigational prototype technology.
Joana Toro
2021 WINNER
Joana Toro is a self-taught Colombian photographer based in New York City and Bogotá, Colombia. Her work explores issues of immigration, human rights, and identity and has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, World Press Photo Witness, Open Society Foundations, and PhotoWorld China magazine, among others.