Sim Chi Yin

Sim Chi Yin (born 1978) is a Singaporean photographer, based between Beijing, China, and London. She works as a documentary photographer and artist who pursues self-directed projects in Asia and is "interested in history, memory, and migration and its consequences". As well as photography she uses film, sound, text and archival material.

The Long Road Home: Journeys Of Indonesian Migrant Workers was published in 2011. Sim is a nominee member of Magnum Photos.

She has been awarded a Magnum Foundation Social Justice and Photography fellowship and the Chris Hondros Award.

Sim was born in Singapore. She read history and international relations at the London School of Economics on a scholarship.

She worked as a print journalist and foreign correspondent at The Straits Times for nine years. In 2010 she quit to work full time as a photographer. Within four years she was working as a photojournalist, getting regular assignments from The New York Times.

Her first major work was "The Rat Tribe", about blue-collar workers in Beijing. It has been published widely and was shown at Rencontres d'Arles in 2012.

Sim spent four years photographing Chinese gold miners living with the occupational lung disease silicosis, published in the photo essay "Dying To Breathe", much of it about He Quangui, also the subject of a short film.

She was commissioned as the Nobel Peace Prize photographer in 2017 to make work about its winner, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. Her photographs of similarities in landscapes related to nuclear weapons, both in the USA and along the China-North Korea border, were exhibited at the Nobel Peace Center museum in Oslo, Norway.

In 2014 she became an interim member of VII Photo Agency, a full member in 2016 then left in 2017. In 2018 she became a nominee member of Magnum Photos.

Sim is currently a PhD candidate on scholarship at King's College London, researching British Malaya.

• The Long Road Home: Journeys Of Indonesian Migrant Workers. Jakarta: International Labour Organization, 2011. ISBN 9789221249955.

• Dying To Breathe (2015) – 10 minute film, directed and filmed by Sim
• Most People Were Silent (2017) – 3:40 minute film with audio soundscape, directed and filmed by Sim

• 2010: Magnum Foundation Social Justice and Photography fellowship at New York University
• 2013: Finalist, W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography from the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund
• 2014: Her World Young Woman Achiever
• 2018: Chris Hondros Award from Getty Images and the Chris Hondros Fund