From my first job in journalism, as an intern in the photo department of the Louisville Courier Journal & TimesI knew I wanted to be a journalist and cover international stories.  I graduated from Harvard College in 1990 with a BA in Medieval European History, a stack of journalism internships and summer jobs under my belt and a complete lack of certainty about how to begin my chosen career.  After travel to Russia, Tibet and running a dive shop in the West Indies I took my first real step as a freelance journalist, heading to Rwanda in the wake of the genocide.  Immediately I knew I’d found my calling.  I focused my work for the next four years on the regional fall-out of the genocide, working in Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo (then Zaire).  I worked for the Associated Press, The Guardianof London, The Independent, The New York Times, among others.  I also conducted three special projects for Human Rights Watch: In Burundi in 1997 outlining the human rights concerns about the government’s ‘regroupment’ policy, investigating small arms trafficking in Africa’s Great Lakes region and an emergency mission to Sierra Leone in 2000.

In 1998 I began working as Official Photographer to Vice President Al Gore at the White House, documenting his life and work until January 2001.  Those images are part of the public record in the National Archives in Washington, DC.  In 2001 I returned to DR Congo, spending three months on a story about the mining and export of the mineral Coltan, which is used to coat computer chips.  The story was run in the New York TimesSunday Magazine.  On September 11th, 2001 I covered events at the Pentagon that day and the following week the New Yorker, getting some of the only close up photographs of the Pentagon early in the morning of September 12th.  Since September 11th I have worked in Afghanistan, the Gaza Strip, Iran and spent fourteen months in Iraq.

In March 2003, during the invasion of Iraq, I was arrested in Baghdad by Saddam Hussein’s security services with four other westerners, held for eight days in solitary confinement and interrogated at Abu Ghraib prison.  Fearing for my life, those days gave me a rare opportunity to consider what it is I truly believe.  I came through that experience certain that journalism as a public service is a critical task and one that I am dedicated to doing and supporting at its best.  I returned to Baghdad less than three weeks after my release, working for many mainstream newspapers and magazines.  In August 2003 Steve Connors and I began co-reporting a project investigating who was behind attacks against US troops in Iraq.  After ten months the story became my first major written piece “Ordinary Warriors” in Vanity Fair(receiving an honorable mention from the Overseas Press Club) and a co-directed, co-produced documentary with Steve Connors called Meeting Resistance(http://www.meetingresistance.com).  The documentary was released in theatres in 2007, on DVD in 2008 and garnered many awards, including the “Golden Prize” at the Al Jazeera International Film Festival.  Steve and I travelled extensively with the film showing it to domestic and international audiences ranging from peace activists to U.S. naval intelligence and were brought to Baghdad to show the film to military and diplomatic audiences in the Green Zone.  Reporting, directing, producing and supporting Meeting Resistancegave me experience in production, marketing, sales, publicity/press and public speaking that I had not previously enjoyed.

I received a Nieman fellowship in 2004 and since then the focus of my work has shifted towards developing a new generation of journalism that better serves and more accurately reflects our world today.