Carlos Javier Ortiz joins the 2012 NSC Speaker Series line-up

Facing Change: Documenting America contributing photographer Carlos Javier Ortiz to speak at the 2012 NSC.   Ortiz was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico and raised in Chicago, Illinois. As a teenager, his love of photography led him to work at a traveling carnival to save money for photography equipment and college tuition. He studied photojournalism at Columbia College Chicago and became a staff photographer for Chicago In The Year 2000 (CITY 2000), a yearlong project documenting the city and its inhabitants. Since that time Carlos work has been published in Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Ebony Magazine and in numerous international print, broadcast and online venues. In 2008 Carlos was named the Illinois Press Photographer Association Photographer of the Year.

 

In 2009 he won the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights Photography award for “Too Young To Die, ” his multi-year, comprehensive examination of youth violence in the United States and Central America. He was also selected as a finalist for the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography. In 2010 Carlos accepted an invitation to become a contributing photographer for  “Facing Change: Documenting America,” a non-profit collective of some of the nation’s best photographers and writers covering under-reported aspects of America’s most urgent issues.  

He has taught graduate photojournalism at Northwestern University and has been a guest lecturer at numerous other colleges and universities. His continuing work on “Too Young To Die” recently led to his selection as a recipient of the Open Society Institute Audience Engagement Grant; it is one of several grants and awards he continues to receive in recognition of this ongoing project.