Susan Meiselas

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Susan Meiselas has worked as a freelance photographer since 1976. She is best known for her coverage of the insurrection in Nicaragua and her documentation of human rights issues in Latin America.

While at Radcliffe, Meiselas is developing a book and installation based on the uncatalogued photo archive of the Harvard filmmaker Richard P. Rogers that considers his creative process in transition from photography to film. She will construct a portrait of a young man, engaged with the visual landscape and committed to its documentation as his visual vocabulary evolves to embrace narrative form.

Meiselas received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and her MA in visual education from Harvard University. She is the author of Carnival Strippers (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), Nicaragua, June 1978–July 1979 (Pantheon Books, 1981), and Pandora’s Box (Magnum Editions, 2001) and the editor of five collections. She has codirected two films, Living at Risk: The Story of a Nicaraguan Family (1976) and Pictures from a Revolution (1991), and collaborated with Picture Projects on akaKURDISTAN, a website for collective memory and cultural exchange. Her first survey book and exhibition, In History (Steidl, 2008), was produced with the International Center for Photography. Her most recent retrospective exhibition, Mediations, was initiated by the Jeu de Paume. Her awards include the Cornell Capa Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Harvard Arts Medal, the Hasselblad Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Maria Moors Cabot Prize, and the Robert Capa Gold Medal. Meiselas is the president of the Magnum Foundation.