Quick Facts
Biography
Finbarr O’Reilly (born 1971 Swansea) is a Canadian photographer, who in February 2006 won the premier award of the 49th annual World Press Photo contest. He is a 2013 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.
life
O’Reilly was born in Swansea in South Wales and raised in Dublin, Ireland until he moved with his family to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada at the age of nine.
He was later an arts correspondent for The Globe and Mail and then spent three years writing pop culture and entertainment pieces for the National Post.
He joined Reuters as a freelance correspondent in 2001.
Work
In 2003 he co-produced The Ghosts of Lomako, a documentary about conservation in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In the same year he co-directed the documentary, The Digital Divide about technology in the developing world.
The international jury of the World Press Photo contest selected a color image of O'Reilly of Reuters as the World Press Photo of the Year 2005. The picture shows the emaciated fingers of a one-year-old child pressed against the lips of his mother at an emergency feeding clinic in Niger.
He is one of several prominent journalists featured in Under Fire: The Psychological Cost of Covering War, a documentary short-listed for a 2012 Academy Award. http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/11/documentary-under-fire-shows-that-war-is-hell-for-journalists/248232/ The film won a 2013 Peabody Award http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/cbc-documentary-channel-s-under-fire-wins-peabody-award-1.1307150
As a 2013 Nieman Fellow at Harvard, O'Reilly spent an academic year researching psychology with a focus on conflict-induced trauma. He is also a 2014 Ochberg Fellow at the DART center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism in New York.
He is based in Dakar, Senegal. He is currently Reuters chief photographer for West and Central Africa. Recently he documented Afrikaner poverty in Coronation Park, a squatter community of around 400 in Krugersdorp, northwest of Johannesburg.