Elizabeth Herman
Photographer / Based in Brooklyn, NY
Biz Herman is a freelance photojournalist, researcher, and writer based between New York City and San Francisco. She is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at UC Berkeley, where her dissertation research focuses on how trauma...
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Focus:
Photographer, Photojournalist, Journalist, Producer, Writer, Researcher, Reporter, Politics, History, Film, Photography, Foreign, Portraiture, Author, Journalist Investigative, Freelance, Editorial Page, Civil Rights and Social Inequality, Humanitarian, Opinions, Metro Desk, Assignments
About
Available in: Brooklyn, NY
Focused on:
Photographer, Photojournalist, Journalist, Producer, Writer, Researcher, Reporter, Politics, History, Film, Photography, Foreign, Portraiture, Author, Journalist Investigative, Freelance, Editorial Page, Civil Rights and Social Inequality, Humanitarian, Opinions, Metro Desk, Assignments
Coverage Regions:
USA & Canada
Languages Spoken: English, Benagli (conversational)
Years of experience: More than 10
Biz Herman is a freelance photojournalist, researcher, and writer based between New York City and San Francisco. She is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at UC Berkeley, where her dissertation research focuses on how trauma impacts intergroup relations and political participation, and she is broadly interested in examining how the psychological and physiological consequences of conflict impact reconciliation.
Her research interests also include the politics of history and national identity; her Masters Thesis focused on representations of 9/11 in high school history textbooks worldwide. She spent 2011 in Bangladesh as a Fulbright Fellow, researching how politics influence the writing of national histories in textbooks. Upon returning to the U.S., she worked for as a freelance photo and written journalist for a number of national and international news outlets, based in New York and reporting from both home and abroad. Her ongoing project, A Woman’s War, is an oral history and documentary photography project examining the lives of women who have served in conflict worldwide; the work spans six countries on four continents and includes over 100 women.
Since 2016, Biz has been an Innovation Fellow at Beyond Conflict’s Innovation Lab, which works to apply research from cognitive and behavioral science to reduce social conflict and foster reconciliation. She also serves as a journalism and documentary filmmaking instructor at NuVu Studio teaching-intensive, hands-on workshops to middle school and high school students in Boston, MA and Mumbai, India.
Biz works as a freelance photojournalist, including as a regular contributor to The New York Times. Most recently, she pitched, produced, co-photographed, and wrote the “The Women of the 116th Congress,” a special project for The New York Times that features portraits of 130 out of the 131 women serving in the 116th Congress shot in the style of historical portrait paintings. The project ran as its own 16-page special section in the paper, printed with 27 different covers, each featuring a different local woman member of Congress that varied depending on where that version of the paper was printed and distributed. The images and writing from the project will be published in Fall 2019 with Abrams Books as a New York Times branded book. See tearsheets of the full special section here.
Biz graduated from Tufts University with Highest Thesis Honors and a B.A. in Political Science and Economics in 2010. Her research and photography have been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, The Boston Globe, The Guardian, NPR, Newsweek Japan, Jezebel, and The Daily Beast, among others.