Kristen Ashburn

Kristen Ashburn's photographs and stories from the Middle East, Europe, and Africa have appeared in many publications worldwide. In 2007 her Bloodline, AIDS and Family multimedia project (www.bloodlineproject.com), produced by Mediastorm.org, was nominated for an Emmy Award. In 2007 she also received the John Faber Award for "The African Scourge," first published by The Los Angeles Times. She is the recipient of two World Press Photo prizes, NPPA's Best of Photojournalism prizes 2007, 2006, 2003, a Getty Image grant in 2006, Canon’s Female Photojournalist Award in 2004. She began photographing the impact of AIDS in southern Africa in 2001, and since then has also produced stories on the war in Iraq, Jewish settlers and suicide bombers in Israel’s occupied territories, and the aftermath of the tsunami in Sri Lanka, Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, the 2010 Haiti Earthquake, MDR-TB in Russia among other stories.

In addition to her humanitarian photography, Ashburn is one of the directors of Through the Eyes of Children: The Rwanda Project, (www.rwandaproject.org) a charity that teaches photography to Rwandan orphans of the 1994 genocide and supports them through the sale of their images.

Kristen acted as a consulting producer on the acclaimed documentary I Am Because We Are film directed by Nathan Rissman and written and produced by Madonna. A book of her images, by the same title, is culled from her work in Malawi and Africa over the past seven years as well as from her specially commissioned photographs for the film—providing an intimate look at the lives of eight Malawian children featured in the film and reveals the harsh reality of the AIDS pandemic throughout southern Africa: published in 2009.