Meridith Kohut

Photojournalist @meridithkohut @MeridithKohut

United States.

Meridith Kohut (b.1983, USA) is an American photojournalist based in Caracas, Venezuela, where she has worked covering Latin America for the foreign press since 2007. For the past three years, she has spent nearly every day documenting the economic and humanitarian crisis in Venezuela - photographing hundreds waiting in breadlines, patients dying from medicine shortages in collapsed public hospitals, people clashing with security forces in violent, anti-government street protests, laboring in illegal gold mines, and getting smuggled alongside cocaine out of the country in small boats. Her work has resulted in dozens of front-page stories published in The New York Times, and is widely recognized as the largest and most comprehensive photographic archive of the crisis made by a single photographer. Her Venezuela crisis work has been recognized by The Overseas Press Club, The George Polk Journalism Awards and Pictures of The Year International. Her 5-month investigation and photo essay that exposed that hundreds of children had died from severe child malnutrition in public hospitals was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Photography in 2018.


Kohut has also produced in-depth photo essays about the rise of Hugo Chávez's socialist revolution in Venezuela, the drug trade in Bolivia, Cuba's transition, gang violence in El Salvador, refugee and migration issues in Central America, labor rights and cholera outbreaks in Haiti, prostitution in Colombia, illegal gold mines and human rights abuses in Venezuela, and prison overcrowding in El Salvador, among others. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times. Her photographs have also been published by National Geographic, Leica, Bloomberg News, NPR, The Washington Post Magazine and Der Spiegel. They have been exhibited at Visa pour L'Image, Sotheby's London, The Annenberg Space for Photography, Columbia University, The Leica Gallery Salzburg & Photoville in Brooklyn, New York.

IWMF Awards