Kate Brooks

Kate Brooks is an international photojournalist and filmmaker who has chronicled conflict and human rights for the past two decades. Her photographs have been extensively published in TIME, Newsweek, Smithsonian, and The New Yorker, and were exhibited in galleries and museums around the world. In 2010 Brooks' love for filmmaking was sparked while working as a cinematographer on the documentary The Boxing Girls of Kabul. Her first book, In the Light of Darkness: A Photographer’s Journey After 9/11, was published in 2011 and selected as one of the best photography books of the year by PDN. In 2012-13, she was a Knight Wallace fellow at the University of Michigan. There, she researched the global wildlife trafficking crisis before embarking on directing her first documentary. Four years later The Last Animals film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on Earth Day 2017 and was awarded a Disruptor Award, alongside those who sacrificed their lives protecting Garamba National Park. The film has since been widely recognized for its ability to disrupt the status quo on policy and change hearts and minds. It later won the Terra Mater Factual Studios Impact Award in consideration with Blue Planet II. The documentary was distributed through National Geographic, Hulu, and Netflix.

Brooks was a Pulitzer Center grantee in 2013 for The New Yorker article "Shopgirls in Saudi Arabia," written by Katherine Zoepf.