Louisa Gouliamaki

Louisa Gouliamaki is a Greek-Polish photojournalist based in Athens, Greece. “Louisa Gouliamaki displayed masterful visual storytelling on both the European refugee crisis and the revolution in Ukraine. Her work comprises immediacy and intensity during violent confrontations and also moments of humanity and warmth. She documents harsh realities with an unflinching eye during moments of chaos and intimate emotion.” — Award Jury Gouliamaki is a permanent stringer for the Agence France-Presse with more than 25 years of experience in news and conflict reporting. Throughout her career, she has been covering conflicts like the Albanian revolution, the conflicts in former Yugoslavia, the Kosovo War and its aftermath, the conflict in Georgia, the anti-globalisation protests, the riots in Athens, the revolution in Kiev and the refugee crisis. Part of her work documenting the protests in Greece, triggered by the economic crisis, The Protestors, was awarded with honors at the Pictures of the Year International (POYi) in 2012 and exhibited at major photo festivals in Greece and abroad. In 2015 Gouliamaki documented the refugee crisis, parallel with the political developments in Greece and continued through 2016 covering thousands of refugees and migrants stranded in Greece. “I’ve been scared, hit by police, and even found myself in situations where I wasn’t sure I’d come out alive. But, like Anja did, I believe we need to keep pushing with our reporting. We owe it to the refugees, the victims of war and social injustice and we owe it to our audiences. There are still so many important stories that need to be told.” — Louisa Gouliamaki

IWMF Awards