Originally broadcast at 10:30 a.m. ET Monday, August 23, 2021.

Lynsey Addario is a Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer who covers conflict zones across the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa. She is a regular contributor to National Geographic, The New York Times, and Time magazine.

Addario began her professional career as a photographer in 1996 with little formal training. A few years later, in 2000, she first traveled to Afghanistan to document life under the Taliban regime. She has returned to Afghanistan numerous times and covered conflicts in Iraq, Lebanon, Darfur, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Libya, where she was among four New York Times journalists kidnapped in 2011. More recently she has covered the Syrian refugee crisis, the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, the fall of ISIS in northern Syria, the civil war in South Sudan, and the flow of African and Middle Eastern migrants into Sicily; in the past year, she has been covering the crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK. It is the resilience she’s seen and documented throughout her career that she will discuss as part of the Chautauqua Lecture Series.

Addario has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the MacArthur Fellowship “Genius” grant, the Overseas Press Club’s Oliver Rebbot award for her series “Veiled Rebellion: Afghan Women,” and was part of the New York Times team honored with the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting “for its masterful, groundbreaking coverage of America’s deepening military and political challenges in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” In 2015, American Photo magazine named Addario as one of the five most influential photographers of the past 25 years, for changing the way we see world conflict.

In 2015, Addario released a New York Times best-selling memoir and finalist for the 2016 Chautauqua Prize, It’s What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War, which chronicles her personal and professional life as a photojournalist coming of age in the post-9/11 world. In 2018 she released Of Love & War, a collection of photographs from the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa. She is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

This program is made possible by The Sondra R. & R. Quintus Anderson Lectureship, "The Chautauqua Lecture" and the Oliver and Mary Langenberg Lectureship Fund.

About Chautauqua Institution: Chautauqua Institution is a community on the shores of Chautauqua Lake in southwestern New York state that comes alive each summer with a unique mix of fine and performing arts, lectures, interfaith worship and programs, and recreational activities. As a community, we celebrate, encourage and study the arts and treat them as integral to all of learning, and we convene the critical conversations of the day to advance understanding through civil dialogue. CHQ Assembly is the online expression of Chautauqua Institution's mission.