Brendan Hoffman

Brendan Hoffman (b. 1980, Albany, NY, USA) is a documentary photographer based in Kyiv, Ukraine, where his work reflects his interest in themes of identity, history, politics, conflict, and the environment. Since 2013 he has primarily covered revolution and war in Ukraine. His work has been published widely, shown at festivals including Visa Pour l’Image, the Zoom Photo Festival in Canada, and the Singapore International Photography Festival, and exhibited across Ukraine, in a major solo show at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art in Chicago, Illinois, and in various galleries and educational institutions across Europe and the United States.

Brendan is a regular contributor to major media including The New York Times and National Geographic, a 2018-19 Fulbright Scholar in Ukraine, and the 2018 Philip Jones Griffiths Award winner. He has received grants from TheDocumentaryProjectFund, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and the National Press Photographers Association, among others.

In 2017 he was named a Reporting Fellow by the South Asian Journalists Association to produce a body of work about the challenges faced by India and Pakistan in sharing water resources in the Indus River basin while confronting climate change and population growth. The project formed the basis for his first feature story for National Geographic Magazine, published in July 2020, and was awarded by Pictures of the Year International.

Brendan has also documented his native United States with his ongoing project “The Beating of the Heart.” Since 2011, he has explored contemporary Middle America in the context of free trade, the decline of blue-collar jobs, and economic and political polarization through the lens of a small town in Iowa called Webster City. In the winter of 2019-2020, he was a photographer-in-residence with Webster City’s local newspaper and taught a free visual storytelling workshop for members of the local community. The project has been supported by a 2019 Magnum Foundation Fund grant, a 2017 residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska, and a 2017 Yunghi grant.

From 2007 to 2013, he was based in Washington, DC, and frequently covered Capitol Hill and the White House. Brendan has worked on assignment in more than twenty countries and is a co-founder of the photography collective Prime.

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