Description:

Presentation of the James Foley Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism Award and discussion with the winners NYT reporter Julie Turkewitz and photographer Federico Rios whose piece “Profiting off Migrants” explores of exploitation of migrants in the Darien Gap from Panama to the U.S.  

Federico Ríos is a photojournalist who has published numerous works on Latinamerica, the armed conflict, environment and its relationship with society.

His early exhibitions included The Signature of Los Ríos at Video Guerrilha in São Paulo, Brazil (2013) and Transputamierda at the Valongo International Photography Festival in Santos, Brazil (2016).

In 2017, Ríos presented his work on FARC, the Colombian armed group, at LaGuardia Community College, New York, at the Kaunas Photo festival in Lithuania and at the Unseen Amsterdam festival. In October 2017 he showed Transputamierda at the Gabo Festival in Medellín, and in 2018 he held "Venus 41, trochas e incertidumbres" a solo exhibition at the Museo de Antioquia in Medellín, Colombia.

Ríos' most recent exhibition, Los días póstumos de una guerra sin final, opened at Bandy Bandy Gallery in Bogotá in February 2020. 

In 2012, Ríos' photobook La ruta del cóndor was jointly published by Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano de Bogotá and Universidad de Caldas. The following year he published Fiestas de San Pacho, Quibdó, together with the photographic collective Mas Uno. 

His most recent photobook, VERDE, was published by Raya with photo editor Santiago Escobar-Jaramillo in 2021.

His work has appeared frequently in The New York Times and also other media such as National Geographic, Stern, GEO, Time, Paris Match and LFI Magazine.

Julie Turkewitz is the Andes bureau chief for The New York Times, covering Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru. Most recently her work has focused on migration, specifically the record number of people making the trek through a dangerous jungle called the Darién to make it to the United States. With photographer Federico Rios she has crossed this jungle twice and spent months in the region documenting the journey for The Times. As bureau chief she also focused on the political and humanitarian crisis in Venezuela.

Prior to working in South America, Julie was a national correspondent for Times, based in Denver. She wrote often about Indigenous voter rights, public lands, gun culture and the opioid crisis, and covered breaking news around the country. 

She began her career with The Times in 2012 in New York, as a freelancer, reporting on breaking news and on New York’s many immigrant communities. She was also a Spanish-speaking reporter on a major investigation into the city’s nail salon industry. Julie studied journalism at the University of North Carolina and was born in Silver Spring, Maryland.