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2021 CATCHLIGHT FELLOWS ANNOUNCED: KORAL CARBALLO, ROOPA GOGINENI, BAYETÉ ROSS SMITH, AND DANIELLA ZALCMAN AWARDED $30,000 EACH *** Event: Thursday, 12pm PST, June 24, 2021 2021 Fellows Meet + Greet Register here

From left to right: Koral Carballo, Roopa Gogineni, Bayeté Ross Smith, and Daniella Zalcman

JUNE 8, 2021, SAN FRANCISCO, CA - CatchLight, a visual-frst media organization, invests in the future of visual storytelling by supporting leaders focused on impact and collaboration through its CatchLight Fellowship. The 2021 Fellows, recipients of four $30,000 grants, are Koral Carballo, Roopa Gogineni, Bayeté Ross Smith, and Daniella Zalcman. The CatchLight Fellowship provides four visionaries in the feld grants to develop long-form storytelling projects, engage audiences and continue their work as innovators and leaders defning the future of the feld. While the Fellowship requires application with a project, CatchLight seeks visual storytellers who are willing to question the industry, stand for inclusivity and innovate as creatives and leaders.

“Given the power of photography and visuals to create an emotional common ground, CatchLight sees it as essential to invest in thoughtful long-form visual storytelling, thus allowing communities to see themselves represented and for audiences to connect with issues intimately” said CatchLight’s CEO, Elodie Mailliet Storm. “All four of these fellows not only show excellence in visual storytelling, they also think deeply about how to engage audiences and the long-term impact of their work, pushing the feld forward.” 2021 CatchLight Fellows use visual art to spark new conversations, engage communities, and foster nuanced representation. Koral Carballo investigates what persists of Afro-Mexican identity and heritage; Roopa Gogineni focuses on historical memory, that of her family from and of the American South; Bayeté Ross Smith visually explores the impact of domestic terrorism and racial violence in modern America and Daniella Zalcman pushes for more diverse voices in the media through the platform Women Photograph.

CatchLight Fellowship allows the grantees to develop their work without time constraint. For example, two 2018 Fellows, Aida Muluneh and Andrea Bruce, continue to work with CatchLight years after their leadership fellowship. Bruce fnalized her project exploring democracy in 2020 and Muluneh is taking part in CatchLight's Impact Fund — an ongoing resource for past and current CatchLight Fellows to further their visual storytelling and engagement work — to create a network of next generation of visual storytellers in fve diferent regions of , who are giving a nuanced representation of their community. See all of CatchLight’s Fellows here.

CatchLight is committed to leveraging the unique power of visual communication as a tool to inform, connect and transform communities. The CatchLight Fellowship’s focus on building innovative ways to engage audiences is a key pillar to defning the future of the feld and counter the rapid general decline of media across the . In addition to the fellowship program, CatchLight is building a new model for non-proft visual journalism at the local and community level. The CatchLight Local shared visual desks pair emerging visual journalists with local newsrooms, which lack visual resources. Together, these two programs are aimed to defne the future and sustainability of visual storytelling.

2021 CATCHLIGHT FELLOWS

KORAL CARBALLO

Nietos. Intervention in our landscape with the family album archive. From the project Siempre Estuvimos Aquí (We Were Always Here)

Project: Siempre Estuvimos Aquí (We Were Always Here) investigates Afro-descent in which often hides in a cloak of tradition and colonization mindset. A historical discourse about the whitewashed origin of Mexicans as a people of indigenous and European descent creates an origin myth about a mixed-race identity that hides other roots, such as the African.

Koral follows her own journey in exploring her family’s background. The process, while occasionally confrontational, is essential to understanding where her family came from. To help further expose this narrative, Koral creates community workshops focused on preserving family photographs, while encouraging conversation about how miscegenation in Mexico has been used as an instrument of racial control and domination.

Through her workshops Koral helps participants rethink their own archives and how preserving them gives them importance and could potentially impact the nation’s view of itself by cataloguing some of these in a more permanent way.

Biography: Koral Carballo was born in Poza Rica, Veracruz, Mexico in 1987. She tells stories related to identity, violence and territory; dissolving frontiers between photojournalism and visual arts. She began her career as a photojournalist in 2009 and in 2016 she decided to leave the local media to investigate her own long-term projects. She founded along with a group of Veracruz photojournalists in 2014 the Mirar Distinto International Festival of Journalistic and Documentary Photography in Mexico, and currently co-produces the festival, in addition to working as a photojournalist, documentary photographer, visual storyteller and freelance artist.

She has received awards and grants from Women Photograph + Getty Images 2019, Magnum Foundation Global Covid Projects 2020, We Women 2019, the Moving Walls 25 Open Society Foundation in 2018, Adelante Reporting Grant 2018 International Women's Media Foundation, Young Creators National Fund for Culture and the Arts (FONCA-Mexico) fellowship in 2018-2019 and 2015- 2016 in the photography category, among others.

Koral has exhibited in Guatemala, , , , , , , Marrakech, , of America, , , Uruguay, and Mexico. She is part of several organizations, including the RUDA Collective, Foto Féminas, Fotógrafas en México, Frontline Freelance Mexico, Diversify Photo, and Women Photograph.

ROOPA GOGINENI

An early morning walk in Gudavalli. From the project Timepass. Projects: Every immigrant has a place they left behind that looms large in the psyche, an invisible but enduring source of nostalgia, or loss, or some combination of both. Roopa’s project Timepass explores that place for her family. In 1976 her parents left Gudavalli, a small coastal village in southern India. For the past decade she flmed and photographed during visits back, anticipating a time when Gudavalli would have changed beyond recognition.

This work in progress is foremost a portrait of a village and a family over time. The images further serve as a record of an India in transition.

In addition to supporting Timepass, the CatchLight Fellowship will allow Roopa to expand on another ongoing project in the American South. Let The Record Show is a co-created visual atlas of southern history that reads into silences. The documentation of sites and archival objects is guided by local and family historians.

Biography: Roopa Gogineni is a documentary photographer and flmmaker from West Virginia. Over the past ten years her work has focused on historical memory and life amidst confict in East Africa. She holds an MSc in African Studies from the University of Oxford where she researched the construction of media narratives around . She works long-term with the communities she documents to develop a visual language that embraces complexity and co-authorship. Her last flm about a revolutionary puppet show in , I am Bisha, earned a Rory Peck Award and the Oscar-qualifying Full Frame Award for Best Short. She is a FRONTLINE/Firelight Fellow and a Women Photograph Grantee. Roopa currently advises a cohort of doctoral students using visual methodology in their study of pastoralism and uncertainty at The Institute of Development Studies.

BAYETÉ ROSS SMITH

Screenshot of Red Summers Video ‘Tulsa race massacre at 100: an act of terrorism America tried to forget’ published May 31, 2021 in The Guardian

Project: Bayeté Ross Smith created ‘Red Summers: Domestic Terrorism 1917-1921’, a series of 360 Virtual Reality videos that tell stories of domestic terrorism and racial violence during the years of 1917-1921, and examine how the events of this time period directly impacted the social, political and economic trajectory of America throughout the rest of the 20th century and into this current moment of division and social unrest within the country. With the support of the CatchLight Fellowship, he will continue and develop the series. The lack of public and legal accountability will be a main point of emphasis. This series will utilize archival images from the events that took place, motion graphics, narration by historians and contemporary 360 video footage to tell these stories and examine their ongoing ripple efects.

Biography: Bayeté Ross Smith is a photographer, artist, and education worker who lives in Harlem, New York. He is a Presidential Leadership Scholar, a TED Resident, a Creative Capital Awardee, an Art For Justice Fund Grantee, a CatchLight Fellow, a BPMPlus Grantee and an AmDOC/POV NY Times embedded mediamaker.

His work is in the collections of The Smithsonian Institution, the Oakland Museum of , the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and The Brooklyn Museum. He has exhibited internationally with the Goethe Institute (), Foto Museum (), the Lianzhou Foto Festival (China), and America House in (), among others. His collaborative projects "Along The Way" and "Question Bridge: Black Males" have shown at the 2008 and 2012 Sundance Film Festival, respectively. His work has also been featured at the Shefeld Doc Fest and the L.A. Film Festival.

He has also created a series of public art projects with organizations such as the Jerome Foundation, BRIC Arts Media, The Amistad Center, The Laundromat Project, the NYC Parks Department, the Hartford YMCA, San Francisco District Attorney’s Ofce and The California Judicial Council. His work has been published in numerous publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, Question Bridge: Black Males in America (2015), Dis:Integration: The Splintering of Black America (2010), Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present (2009), Black: A Celebration of A Culture (2005), The Spirit Of Family (2002) and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

In addition to his creative work in art and media, Bayeté helped launch and continues to work with the Kings Against Violence Initiative (KAVI), a hospital and school based violence prevention organization in Brooklyn NY that partners with Kings County Hospital. He is also a faculty member at the International Center of Photography and New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.

DANIELLA ZALCMAN

Screenshot of Women Photograph platform: 2020 year in pictures Project: Daniella Zalcman founded Women Photograph in 2017 in response to the gender imbalance and broader iniquities that plague the photojournalism industry. With a database of over 1,300 independent women and nonbinary photographers based in over 110 countries, Women Photograph serves as a hiring resource for photo editors and gatekeepers in the visual journalism feld.

Women Photograph's mission is to shift the makeup of the photojournalism community and ensure that the industry's chief storytellers are as diverse as the communities they hope to represent.

With the support of the Catchlight Fellowship, Daniella hopes to build Women Photograph into a more sustainably structured and funded organization, both to strengthen its reach as an advocacy organization and to ensure that it can continue to work efectively.

Biography: Daniella Zalcman is a Vietnamese-American documentary photographer based between New Orleans and New York. She is a multiple grantee of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a fellow with the International Women's Media Foundation, a National Geographic Society grantee, and the founder of Women Photograph, a non-proft working to elevate the voices of women and nonbinary visual journalists.

Her work tends to focus on the legacies of western colonization, from the rise of homophobia in East Africa to the forced assimilation education of Indigenous children in North America. Her ongoing project, Signs of Your Identity, is the recipient of the Arnold Newman Prize, a Robert F Kennedy Journalism Award, the FotoEvidence Book Award, the Magnum Foundation's Inge Morath Award, and part of Open Society Foundation's Moving Walls 24.

Daniella regularly lectures at high schools and universities, and is available for assignments and speaking engagements internationally. She is a member of the board of trustees of the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund and the board of directors of the ACOS Alliance. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in architecture in 2009.

HONORABLE MENTIONS: 2021 FINALISTS CatchLight is proud to recognize the following fnalists for this year’s fellowship. Stay tuned for future opportunities to learn more about these incredible artists this year through CatchLight’s events and programming.

● Laura Boushnak ● Adrian Burrell ● Sharon Castellanos ● Oscar Castillo ● Patrick Lee ● Joshua Rashaad McFadden ● Anastasia Taylor-Lind ● An Rong Xu

2021 FELLOWSHIP JURY CatchLight extends a special thanks to this year’s Fellowship judges, which included a panel of experts in the visual storytelling feld. This cohort of judges is the most diverse group gathered to date by CatchLight.

● Michelle Branch, Board President, SF Camerawork ● Pamela Chen, Human-centered artifcial intelligence Fellow, Stanford University ● Aida Muluneh, Contemporary Artist, Curator, and Educator, Founder of Addis Foto Fest and 2018 CatchLight Fellow ● Elizabeth Krist, Photo Editor and Founding Member of the Visual Thinking Collective ● Brent Lewis, Co-Founder Diversify Photo and Photo Editor at the New York Times ● Santiago Lyon, Head of Advocacy and Education for Adobe's Content Authenticity Initiative ● Tanvi Mishra, Creative Director, The Caravan ● Bertan Selim, Head of Programmes, Prince Claus Fund ABOUT CATCHLIGHT CatchLight, a nonproft media organization leveraging the power of visuals to inform, connect and transform communities. Borrowing from the practices of art, journalism, and social justice, it believes in the power of visual storytelling to foster a more nuanced and empathetic understanding of the world. It serves as a transformational force, urgently bringing resources and organizations together to better inform and connect communities. Its goal is to discover, develop, and amplify visual storytellers at all levels. To learn more about CatchLight programs, visit: catchlight.io