Bikem Ekberzade
Bikem Ekberzade is a photojournalist who focuses on forced migration in forgotten conflicts. She started her career as a videographer in United States, and soon continued her profession as a photojournalist in the U.S. and worldwide. She has worked for numerous international news outlets such as CNN International, Newsweek, Businessweek, Der Spiegel and The Christian Monitor.
She is interested in a combination of visual story telling and written documentation of witness accounts. She covered the Kosovo conflict, the refugee crises in Pakistan and post-9/11 intervention by the United States in Afghanistan. In 2003 she covered the Iraq conflict from across the border in southeastern Turkey, focusing on the human toll and the regional impact. The same year she started work on her first book, Illegal, which would take her 3 years to complete, and be published in Turkey in 2006. In 2005 she left for Darfur to cover the refugee crises in eastern Chad. West-end of the Border, her second book would be published in 2010, as an e-book of photography and free of charge.
In 2011 Ekberzade took a post with the United Nations in Iraq, and left to continue to pursue journalism a year later.
In an era of too much unreliable information, she still puts her faith in solid journalism based on facts and field work. Having witnessed the birth of the internet, she believes in the potential of global digital networks and likes to think of herself as a multimedia journalist.
She is based in and works out of Istanbul.
