2023 Visual Storytelling Summit

Harika Maddala is a staff photojournalist at Bay City News, documenting everyday Stockton. Maddala is a current CatchLight Local Fellow and a Report for America corps member. As a 2022 research fellow with the Starling Lab for Data Integrity, they documented Stockton’s homelessness crisis. In 2021, Maddala placed in the top 10 in Hearst Journalism Awards for their multimedia story about a police-involved killing in Vallejo published by Golden Gate Xpress. Maddala also won the Fran Ortiz grant to work with the families who lost their loved ones to police violence in the Bay Area.

Sarahbeth Maney is a staff photojournalist at the Detroit Free Press. She previously covered national politics at The New York Times’s Washington bureau as a 2021-22 photography fellow. In 2022, Maney became the first photographer to receive the National Association of Black Journalists Michael J. Feeney Emerging Journalist of the Year Award. Originally from the California Bay Area, her personal work focuses on housing inequality, education, disability, and social issues that disproportionately impact Black and brown communities. As a journalist, her goal is to further representation within the industry and portray each story as honestly as it exists.

Ashima Yadava is a conceptual documentary photographer and printmaker. With the camera as her conduit, she works on long-form stories and believes in art as a means to social activism and reform. Born & raised in New Delhi, India, Yadava now lives in San Francisco, where she works in digital and analog methods. Her work has been featured in publications around the world including National Geographic, Mother Jones, SFChronicle, among others. She is a Director’s Fellow from the ICP, New York. currently a California Arts Council’s Fellow and serves on the Programming Committee of SF Camerawork. She is the founder of Huq: I Seek No Favor.

Elodie Mailliet Storm is CatchLight’s CEO. Mailliet Storm is a recognized creative and business leader in the visual storytelling space. In 2016, Mailliet Storm was named a JSK fellow in media innovation at Stanford University where she researched the monetization of photography in the age of social and search. During her 11 years at Getty Images, she oversaw and helped build Getty Images’ content offering and helped lead its strategic development. Most recently she was Getty Images’ Senior Director of Strategic Development based in the Bay Area focusing on Getty Images’ relationships with platforms such as Google, Instagram, Pinterest, and Airbnb.

Tammy Oler is Vice President of Marketing for MPB, the largest global platform to buy, sell, and trade used photo and video gear. She is a marketing leader dedicated to driving circular and sustainable growth with over twenty years of experience with clients and firms that range from global consumer goods companies to non-profits and progressive political organizations.

Josué Rivas (Mexica and Otomi) is an Indigenous Futurist, creative director, visual storyteller, and entrepreneur working at the intersection of art, technology, journalism, and decolonization. His work aims to challenge the mainstream narrative about Indigenous peoples, co-create with the community, and serve as a vehicle for collective healing. He is a 2022 NDN Collective Radical Imagination Fellow, Catchlight Global Fellow, Magnum Foundation Photography and Social Justice Fellow, founder of INDÍGENA, co-founder of Indigenous Photograph, and curator at Indigenous TikTok. Some of his recent collaborators include Nike, Adobe, Adidas, Levi’s, Apple, and National Geographic.

An American artist who moves between observational photography and studio practice. Her work explores notions of environmentalism, consumerism and the picturesque. Recent exhibitions include C/O Berlin, Fundación Mapfre, Eastman Museum, Chrysler Museum of Art, The Photographers’ Gallery, London, and Kunst Haus Wien. In 2022 Samoylova was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. Her work is in the collections of the Perez Art Museum, Miami; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago. Published monographs include Image Cities (Fundación Mapfre/Hatje Cantz, 2023), Floridas (Steidl, 2022) and FloodZone (Steidl, 2019).

A Brazilian photographer currently reporting on the climate and economic crisis in his country for National Geographic and Washington Post. His project ‘Forest Ruins’ documenting the resistance of the Guarani-Mbya indigenous community on the outskirts of São Paulo, the biggest metropolis on The Americas, was shortlisted on the Leica Oskar Barnack award in 2022. He also won the World Press Photo Book Award and the POYLatam in 2021 with his collective Covid Latam. In 2022 Vilela was awarded with the CatchLight Global Fellowship and the National Geographic Explorer grant.

Adrian Burrell is a 2021-22 YBCA Creative Cohort fellow. His film “The Game God(s)” won Best Documentary Short at BlackStar Film Festival in 2022. His work is in the permanent collection at SFMOMA. Burrell is a United States Marine Corps veteran. He graduated with a BFA in film from SFAI and MFA from Stanford’s Department of Art & Art History. In 2022, he was a visiting artist with Stanford’s Institute for Diversity in the Arts, an SFFILM and Black Rock Senegal artist in residency.

Lynn Johnson photographs the human condition. A regular contributor to National Geographic, Johnson is known for finding beauty and meaning in elusive, difficult subjects. As an educator, she invites students of diverse ages and identities to challenge themselves—to see the world with their own eyes & spirit.

Isadora Kosofsky is an acclaimed documentary photographer and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. She takes an immersive approach to visual storytelling, often spending months and years with individuals and communities. She has focused on disability rights, health, aging, incarceration, and the impacts of childhood trauma. Kosofsky is a National Geographic Magazine Photographer and a frequent contributor to the New York Times, TIME, Le Monde, Geo Germany, and others. Kosofsky is a TED Fellow, part of a network of global changemakers, and gave a talk at TED 2018 in Vancouver. She was a 2020 Gwen Ifill Mentor through the IWMF, and has guest lectured at dozens of universities. Her book titled “Senior Love Triangle” was published by Kehrer Verlag in 2020.

Ximena Natera is a Mexican documentary photographer currently based in Berkeley, California, where she is a staff photographer at Berkeleyside, a CatchLight Local Fellow and Report for America corps member. She is a founding member of Pie de Pagina, an award-winning Mexican news organization, where she reported on Central American migration and the aftermath of the war on drugs. Themes of resilience and collective memory guide her work. She graduated from the International Center of Photography and Escuela de Periodismo Carlos Septien and has been a fellow for the Garcia Márquez and the International Women’s Media Foundations.

Nina Thompson is a reporter at YR Media, an award-winning media, technology, and music training center and platform for emerging BIPOC content creators who are using their voices to change the world. She focuses on topics about youth and education, and her work has appeared on YR Media, KCBS and KQED in the Bay Area, Grist, and NextCity. Thompson is a high school student in Berkeley studying in an international baccalaureate program and leads a harm reduction club at her school. She hopes to pursue a career in healthcare while exploring her interests in journalism, art, and politics.

Pamela Chen’s expertise is shaped by two decades of experience, including her time as editorial director of Instagram and senior photo editor for National Geographic. At MediaStorm, she was recognized with a national Emmy Award for news & documentary programming. Currently, Chen works with Apple Camera and Photos, is on the board of the Magnum Foundation, and is an affiliate fellow with Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered AI.

Jonas Bendiksen (b. 1977, Norway) began his career 20 years old when he went to Russia. His images from the former USSR became his first book, “Satellites” (2006). Following this, he experimented with 360-degree photography in “The Places We Live” (2008), exploring daily life in four urban slums. In “The Last Testament” (2017), he photographed seven men who claimed to be the Messiah. “The Book of Veles” (2021) became hotly debated after Bendiksen revealed that what had appeared to be a classical piece of photojournalism was in large part synthetic computer-generated renderings. Bendiksen joined Magnum Photos in 2004.

Hany Farid is a Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, with a joint appointment in Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and the School of Information. His research focuses on digital forensics, forensic science, misinformation, image analysis, and human perception. Farid received an undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics from the University of Rochester in 1989, a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997. Following a two-year post-doctoral fellowship in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he joined the faculty at Dartmouth College in 1999 where he remained until 2019.

Alexey Yurenev is a photographer and a visual researcher investigating memory and technology that mediates it. His documentary projects have been published in The New York Times, National Geographic, Topic and Literary Hub. His work has been acknowledged by organizations such as Photographer of the Year International and Silurian Society of New York and nominated for an EMMY and SHORTY awards. In 2020, Yurenev co-founded a platform dedicated to innovative visual strategies FOTODEMIC.org and became a faculty member at The International Center of Photography in New York. Yurenev is currently based between New York and The Netherlands where he is attending a Photography & Society Master at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague.