Rita Leistner at Java Café
Photographs from Iraq
By award-winning photojournalist Rita Leistner
Wednesday, May 18th, 7pm
Free slide-show and talk
Java Café & Gallery
Award-winning photojournalist Rita Leistner will show some of her work from Iraq in 2003 and 2004, and discuss her experiences covering the war.
Rita Leistner is a Canadian photojournalist based in New York and Toronto. She specializes in in-depth portrait stories, often writing the text to accompany her photographs. For the past two years, she has been covering the conflict in Iraq. She has also worked in South America and in Cambodia, where she lived in 1998 and 1999.
Rita's approach to photojournalism has been influenced by nearly a decade of working as a lighting specialist in the film industry in Toronto. A graduate of The International Center of Photography, she also has an MA in comparative literature from The University of Toronto.
Her work has been published in Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, The Walrus, Macleans, Colors, and Jalouse among others.
Her Iraq work has received awards from The National Press Photographers' Association "2004 Best of Photojournalism" as well as the NPPA's "2004 Women in Journalism Contest." Rita's work is currently leading the national finalists (with 6 nomintations in both writing and visual categories) in the 2004 Canadian National Magazine Awards, to be announced in June. In addition, she has won bursaries from The Rory Peck Trust and The Canada Council for the Arts, and won the 2003 International Center for Photography Johnson & Johnson Fellowship. Her photographs have been exhibited in Canada, The United States, France, and Cambodia.
Her upcoming book, Unembedded Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq, Chelsea Green publishers, a collaboration with Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, Kael Alford, and Throne Anderson, is being released in September, 2005 (www.chelseagreen.com).
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