Susan Meiselas

Susan Meiselas is a documentary photographer who lives and works in New York. She is the author of Carnival Strippers (1976), Nicaragua (1981), Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History (1997), Pandora’s Box (2001), Encounters with the Dani (2003) Prince Street Girls (2016), A Room Of Their Own (2017) and Tar Beach (2020). She has co-edited two collective books: El Salvador, Work of 30 Photographers (1983) and Chile from Within (1990), republished as an e-book in 2013, and has also co-directed two films: Living at Risk (1985) and Pictures from a Revolution (1991) with Richard P. Rogers and Alfred Guzzetti.

Meiselas is known for her documentary work on human rights in Latin America. Her photographs can be found in various North American and international collections. She has been honoured with numerous awards: she received the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1992, the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2015, and more recently she received the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Award in 2019 as well as the first Women in Motion Award from Kering and Rencontres d’Arles. Mediations, a retrospective exhibition of her work from the 1970s to the present, was recently presented at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, the Jeu de Paume, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Instituto Moreira Salles in São Paulo.

Since 2007, she has chaired the Magnum Foundation, which supports, trains and guides the next generation of photographers towards a thorough and innovative documentary practice.

Portrait of Susan Meiselas by Meryl Levine