Laura Beltrán Villamizar is a photography editor and educator born in Bogotá, Colombia.
She is the Projects Picture Editor for NPR, working with the organization’s growing efforts to shape their enterprise visual journalism. She is also the founder of Native Agency – a non-profit, platform dedicated to the promotion and development of female and visual journalists from under-represented regions and communities. Laura currently leads workshops on intersectionality, racial imagery and non-western storytelling. She has also written extensively on localised, non-western visual journalism and photography for Nieman Reports at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Before founding Native, she worked at the World Press Photo Foundation, where she led educational programs in Latin America and co-produced the yearly Joop Swart Masterclass in Amsterdam.

Prior to joining World Press Photo, she was Associate Photo Editor for Revolve Magazine where she oversaw long-term features, international commissions for print and online, and curated the magazine’s emphasis on visual storytelling.
Laura has served on the jury for New Orleans Photo Alliance — The Michael P. Smith Fund For Documentary Photography, the Catchlight Fellowship 2018, the FENCE at Photoville in 2018. She won first prize for NPPA’s quarterly picture editing prize in Q3 of and second place in Q2 of 2018.

She was also selected for Alexia’s Foundation Seminar: “Latin America: Stories That Drive Change” (Miami, 2017). Laura currently lives and works in Washington, D.C.