VIOLETA
SANTOS MOURA

ABOUT

I am a photojournalist from Vila Real de Trás-os-Montes, Portugal, born in the glorious '80s. In 2017 I was named by TIME one of '34 Female Photographers to Follow'.  I'm also a  National Geographic Society grantee, a recipient of the Kim Wall/IWMF Memorial Fund, member of Women Photograph and, since September 2022, a staff visual journalist/photojournalist for Reuters in Madrid, Spain.

While working as a wire journalist in Jerusalem I began to document my written stories through photography. Since then, my freelance visual reporting took me from covering Portugal and Spain, amidst the European economic crisis, to the Middle East, reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and on less visible aspects there, such as the African asylum-seeking community in Israel. I also documented different aspects of the Kashmir conflict on the 70th anniversary of the longest ongoing case of military rule over a civilian population. Other story topics include the connection between conservative politics in Poland and the impact of air pollution as well as the origins and toll of a protracted human trafficking crisis in Nepal or the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Back to Europe, and while continuing my overseas work , I have sought to examine my own society, most recently through an in-depth longterm series on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the remote and isolated rural areas of northern Portugal.