Rita Leistner

In 2003, unable to get a military embed, Rita walked to Iraq with Kurdish smugglers. Rita has an MA in comparative literature from the University of Toronto, and worked in the film industry as a lighting specialist before moving to Cambodia in 1997 to work as an independent photojournalist. Rita works in the tradition of “Concerned Photography” which she studied at the International Centre for Photography in New York. Challenging the barriers between genres, Rita’s work merges artistic and documentary practice with an ethnographic approach to subject matter: Working from the inside out, allowing the subjects to define themselves in the framework of photographic story-telling. Rita is a dynamic public speaker and social activist who lectures widely and often publishes her writing alongside her award-winning photographs. Rita’s photographs have been exhibited widely and published in books and magazines such as Battlespace: Unrealities of War, Time, Newsweek, Vanity Fair Italy, Rolling Stone, The Walrus, Maclean’s, Ideas, Alphabet City, Colors and Mother Jones. She is co-author of Unembedded: Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq. Her documentary project on First Nations (Native Indian) communities in North America was selected for the Cultural Olympiad at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic Games.