Email: hmp338@nyu.edu
Thesis Title: "Sudan's Revolutionary Women: Plotting the Future in a Time of Uncertainty"
Holly is an independent visual journalist pursuing our Journalism / Near Eastern Studies dual MA. Holly earned bachelors’ degrees in history and journalism from the University of Montana in Missoula before working as a staff photographer at The Spokesman-Review newspaper in Washington State, then relocated to Cairo, Egypt, to work as a freelance photojournalist. She spent nearly a decade based first in Cairo, and later in Istanbul, working for international news outlets especially in North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. Though Holly has worked in conflict areas in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries, she seeks ways to humanize people, situations and events; her images often focus on daily life and the struggles and aspirations of ordinary people. She followed the story of an Iraqi refugee family she met in Cairo for nine years, as they eventually immigrated to the United States and became naturalized citizens. She reported from Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya during the Arab uprisings of 2011, and documented the Syrian refugee crisis in eight countries, including Syria. She was a 2008 Arthur F. Burns Journalism Fellow in Munich, Germany, and received a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting for a series documenting the lives of Syrian refugees in Europe, in 2014. She received the Kathryn Davis Fellowship for Peace to study Arabic at Middlebury College’s Summer Language School in 2017, and was a 2018 International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF) African Great Lakes Reporting Initiative fellow and grantee in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Holly returned to the U.S. in 2017 and settled in NYC, where she continues to freelance while pursuing her master’s degree. Her interests include feminism in the Middle East, gender issues, social movements, conflict and conflict resolution, transitional justice, human migration, mass media, and press freedom and protection.