Ana María Arévalo Gosen
documentary
feminist
intimacy
portrait
reportage
storytelling
She was born in 1988 in Caracas, Venezuela. In 2009, she moved for five years to Toulouse, France, where she studied Political Sciences (at Institut d’Etudes Politiques) and found her passion for photography (ETPA, Ecole de photographie). In 2014, she moved to Hamburg, Germany, and started to work as a visual storyteller. She also worked as a staff photographer for the SZENE Magazine and did freelance work for some outlets. Between 2016 and 2017, she developed her most challenging work: “The Meaning Of Life”. It is the intimate story of her husband’s fight against testicular cancer. Today, they use this project to raise awareness about this disease. Each year, the exhibition of the photography series raises funds for male cancer research. In 2018 and 2019, they organized an exhibition in Madrid and Bilbao simultaneously for the Movember Foundation. In 2020, they partnered up with Ralph Lauren, participated in their Pink Pony campaign for cancer awareness and raised funds with their support for the Asociación Española Contra El Cáncer. Her roots called her back to Venezuela in 2017 where she developed “Días eternos”, an in-depth work on the condition of women in pretrial detention and prisons in the country. This work was consecutively awarded the first place of the POY Latam in the category “the strength of women”, then the Lucas Dolega Award and eventually the LUMIX photo Award in 2020. It was also finalist for the IWPA. “Días eternos” was made possible by the support of Women Photograph (2018) and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting Travel Grant (2018). Her work has been published in international outlets like the New York Times, LFI, 6 Mois Magazine, El País, El Pais Semanal, Wordt Vervold, the Washington Post, DUMMY Magazine… It has been exhibited at the Manifesto Festival in Toulouse (2019), the Helsinki Photo Festival (2020), Photoville in New-York (2020). In April 2018, she was invited to participate in a conference in Defense of Human Rights (FIU, Miami). In partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, she also give classes to high school children. Currently based in Bilbao, Spain, and still spending long periods of time in Venezuela every year, she is a Women Photograph member, an Ayun Fotografas member and have been a National Geographic Explorer since 2020. She is a fighter for women’s rights and her weapon is slow visual storytelling.