Speaker — Mary F. Calvert

Mary F. Calvert  is a documentary woman’s issues
photojournalist based in Washington, D.C. Represented
by ZUMA Press.

Before beginning her freelance career, Mary worked as a
staff photographer for eleven years on the award-winning
staff of The Washington Times. While the bulk of her daily
assignments focused on covering Congress, political
campaigns and The White House, Mary’s true photographic
calling was, and continues to be, documenting
the humanitarian struggle of women around the world.

2007 Pulitzer Feature Photography Finalist for documenting
the societal stigma of sub-Sahara women afflicted with
obstetric fistula after childbirth. 2008 Robert F. Kennedy
Journalism Award in International Photography for her project,
“Lost Daughters: Sex Selection in India”, chronicling the
social and economic motivations for the widely prevalent practice of Indian doctors performing
abortions of female fetuses. Also in 2008, she was awarded the White House News Photographers
Association Project Grant to document sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The resulting project being named as a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Photography
for “ …courageous work published in The Washington Times that vividly documents how rapes,
by the tens of thousands, have become a weapon of war in Congo”.

Calvert believes that journalists have a duty to shine a light into the deepest recesses of the human
experience and provide a mirror for society to examine itself. Exploring the plight of women and
children worldwide as they struggle to secure for themselves the most basic human rights while
enduring the effects of armed conflict is a subject that must be illuminated with conviction and
consistency. Calvert  a true believer that the light cast by her labor is capable of affecting meaningful
social change.

That belief and commitment to Calvert’s craft has taken her from homeless encampments in Japan
to war torn Africa and Afghanistan, always looking to shine a light in those dark recesses.

Palm Beach Photographic Center instructor for Fotofusion 2011. 2010 Momenta Workshops instructor
for India Workshop. Currently teaching Intermediate photojournalism at the Corcoran College of Art +
Design in Washington D.C. And in past has been apart of the Western Kentucky University Mountain
Workshops, the NPPA’s Flying Short Course, and the Eddie Adams Workshop, she has been a member
of the faculty for the Department of Defense Worldwide Military Photographers Workshop in Ft. Meade
for the last thirteen years.

In September 2010, Calvert traveled to Northern Nigeria to document how religious zealotry and
misinformation have coerced villagers into refusing vaccination and led to the reemergence of polio only
a few years after it nearly joined smallpox on the IDC’s list of eradicated diseases.

Calvert makes her home in Annapolis, Maryland, with her husband Joseph M. Eddins, Jr. and 21-year-old
daughter, Mary Stone Eddins.