Lynsey Addario

Lynsey Addario is a Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer who covers conflict zones across the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa. She is a regular contributor to National Geographic, The New York Times, and Time magazine. 

Addario began her professional career as a photographer in 1996 with little formal training. A few years later, in 2000, she first traveled to Afghanistan to document life under the Taliban regime. She has returned to Afghanistan numerous times and covered conflicts in Iraq, Lebanon, Darfur, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Libya, where she was among four New York Times journalists kidnapped in 2011. More recently she has covered the Syrian refugee crisis, the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, the fall of ISIS in northern Syria, the civil war in South Sudan, and the flow of African and Middle Eastern migrants into Sicily; in the past year, she has been covering the crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK and the war in Ukraine. It is the resilience she’s seen and documented throughout her career that she will discuss as part of the MPSF Series. 

Addario has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the MacArthur Fellowship “Genius” grant, the Overseas Press Club’s Oliver Rebbot award for her series “Veiled Rebellion: Afghan Women,” and was part of the New York Times team honored with the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting “for its masterful, groundbreaking coverage of America’s deepening military and political challenges in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” In 2015, American Photo magazine named Addario as one of the five most influential photographers of the past 25 years, for changing the way we see world conflict. 

In 2016 Addario released a New York Times best-selling memoir, It’s What I Do, which chronicles her personal and professional life as a photojournalist coming of age in the post-9/11 world. In 2018 she released Of Love & War, a collection of photographs from the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa. She is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.