Susan Meiselas

At 75 years old, Susan Meiselas physical status not available right now. We will update Susan Meiselas's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

After earning her degree from Harvard, Meiselas was an assistant film editor on the Frederick Wiseman documentary Basic Training. From 1972 to 1974, she worked for New York City public schools, running workshops for teachers and children in the Bronx and designing photography curricula for 4th–6th graders. In the mid 1970s, Meiselas began working on a project she later titled the Prince Street Girls, a series that features young and adolescent girls from Little Italy in New York City. She also worked for the State Arts Commissions of South Carolina and Mississippi setting up photography programs in rural schools and served as a consultant to Polaroid and the Center for Understanding Media in New York City.

Her first major photography project documented strippers at New England fairs and carnivals, which she worked on during summers while teaching in the New York City public schools. The project resulted in an exhibition at the Whitney Museum and a book, Carnival Strippers, that incorporated audio interviews with the subjects on a CD packaged with the book.

In the late 1970s, Meiselas documented the insurrection in Nicaragua and human rights issues in Latin America. Her most notable photograph from this project was Molotov Man, which depicts a man (later identified as Pablo 'Bareta' Aruaz) poised to throw a molotov cocktail made from a Pepsi bottle in his right hand, while holding a rifle in his left hand. The became a symbol of the Sandinista revolution and was widely reproduced and remixed in Nicaragua. Latterly, outside this context, it was reproduced via an Internet meme based on Joy Garnett's 2003 painting Molotov, thus becoming a prominent case-study of the appropriation, transformation, and quotation in art. Her photographs of the Nicaraguan Revolution have been incorporated into local textbooks in Nicaragua. Her 1991 documentary film, Pictures from a Revolution, depicts her return to sites she photographed and conversations with subjects of the photographs as they reflect on the images ten years after the war. In 2004, Meiselas returned to Nicaragua to install nineteen mural-size images of her photographs at the locations where they were taken. The project was called "Reframing History."

In 1981, she visited a village destroyed by government forces in El Salvador and took pictures of the El Mozote massacre, working with journalists Raymond Bonner and Alma Guillermoprieto.

Beginning in 1992, Meiselas used MacArthur Foundation funding to curate a photographic history of Kurdistan, resulting in the book Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History and a corresponding website, akaKurdistan.

In a 2008 interview with Phong Bui in The Brooklyn Rail, Meiselas says:

Over several months in 2015 and 2016, Meiselas worked on a project about women in refuges in the Black Country area of the West Midlands, England. The project was made in collaboration with Multistory, a local community arts charity, which published a book of the work, A Room of Their Own (2017).

Source

• 1978: Robert Capa Gold Medal for "outstanding courage and reporting" by the Overseas Press Club for her work in Nicaragua
• 1982: American Society of Media Photographers Photojournalist of the Year
• 1982: Leica Award for Excellence
• 1985: Engelhard Award from the Institute of Contemporary Art
• 1992: MacArthur Fellowship, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
• 1994: Maria Moors Cabot Prize from Columbia University for her coverage of Latin America
• 1994: Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism
• 1994: Hasselblad Award
• 1999: Nederlands Foto Instituut Grant, "Photoworks-in-Progress: Constructing Identity"
• 2005: Infinity Award: Cornell Capa Award, International Center of Photography, New York City
• 2006: Royal Photographic Society's Centenary Medal and Honorary Fellowship (HonFRPS)
• 2011: Harvard Arts Medal, Arts First, Harvard University
• 2015: Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
• 2019: Winner, Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize for her retrospective exhibition, Mediations, at Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris.