Photojournalist Lynsey Addario will deliver the 36th Joe Alex Morris Jr. Memorial Lecture at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism on Jan. 18, 2018. The annual Morris Lecture honors an American overseas correspondent or commentator on foreign affairs who is invited to Harvard to speak about international news coverage.
Addario covers important news and feature stories around the globe and regularly works for The New York Times, National Geographic and Time magazine. Since September 11, 2001, she has reported on conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, Darfur, South Sudan and Congo. She also photographs feature stories on humanitarian and human rights issues across the Middle East, South Asia and Africa, with a specific focus on women’s issues.
In 2015, American Photo Magazine named Addario as one of the five most influential photographers of the past 25 years, saying she changed the way we see the world’s conflicts. In 2009, she was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship.
She additionally was part of the New York Times team to win the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for her photographs in “Talibanistan,” published in The New York Times Magazine. And in 2016, she released a New York Times best-selling memoir, “It's What I Do,” which chronicles her personal and professional life as a photojournalist.
The Joe Alex Morris Jr. Memorial Lecture honors the Los Angeles Times foreign correspondent who was killed while covering the Iranian Revolution in Tehran in February 1979. In the fall of 1981, Morris posthumously received the Nieman Fellows’ Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity. The lectureship in his name was created in 1981 by his family, Harvard classmates and friends.
Morris was a member of the Harvard class of 1949. After working as a local reporter at The Hartford Times and the Minneapolis Tribune, he worked at Newsweek and later the Los Angeles Times. He reported from the Middle East for 25 years.
The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard educates leaders in journalism and elevates the standards of the profession through special programs that convene scholars and experts in all fields. More than 1,500 journalists from 96 countries have been awarded Nieman Fellowships since 1938. The foundation’s other initiatives include Nieman Reports, a quarterly print and online magazine that covers thought leadership in journalism; Nieman Lab, a website that reports on the future of news, innovation and best practices in the digital media age; and Nieman Storyboard, a website that showcases exceptional narrative journalism and explores the future of nonfiction storytelling.
