Andrea Bruce

Andrea Bruce is an award-winning documentary photographer, educator, artist and journalist whose work focuses on ideas of democracy and people living in the aftermath of war. For over 15 years she has chronicled the world’s most troubled areas, focusing on Iraq and Afghanistan. She often concentrates on the social issues that are sometimes ignored and often ignited in war's wake. Her clients include National Geographic and The New York Times as well as many publications around the globe.

A National Geographic Explorer, Bruce is the publisher and creator of the hyper-local, visual-first publication Down in the County serving Pamlico County, NC. She is also a member/ owner of the photo agency NOOR, an Amsterdam-based international agency for documentary photography and visual storytelling.

Bruce started working in Iraq in 2003, bringing a local reporter’s knack for intimacy and community focus to the lives of Iraqis and the U.S. military. For eight years she worked as a staff photographer for The Washington Post, where she originated and authored a weekly column called "Unseen Iraq.” She also worked at The Concord Monitor and The St. Petersburg Times after graduating from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1995.

Bruce has been named Photographer of the Year four times by the White House News Photographers Association; received several awards from the Pictures of the Year International contest, including the 2017 Environmental Vision Award; and was awarded the prestigious John Faber Award from the Overseas Press Club in New York. A 2016 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University where she studied political theory and democracy, Bruce is a CatchLight Fellow. She teaches for New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and will receive an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2024.