Radhika Chalasani Radhika Chalasani,who is of Indian descent, was born in Brooklyn, New York and grew up on Long Island. She studied Foreign Affairs, graduating from the University of Virginia in 1988. After university she spent over a year backpacking around the world which led to the start of her photographic career on staff at Agence France-Presse's Asia Pacific regional headquarters in Hong Kong in 1990. She left AFP three years later to freelance in Vietnam and was represented by Gamma-Liaison photo agency, as the country was emerging from years of isolation after the Vietnam War and working to normalize relations with the U.S. From Vietnam she moved to Nairobi, Kenya in 1996 where she has spent the past four years covering major news events such as the the Rwandan refugees return home from the former Zaire and the start of the civil war there in 1996, the fall of Mobutu in 1997 and the famine in southern Sudan in 1998 for her agency,Sipa Press, the United Nations and major magazines and newspapers in the U.S. and Europe as well as photographing feature/documentary stories on a wide range of subjects in black and white and color. She is now based in Nairobi and New York and travels worldwide. Chalasani's work from the Congo/former Zaire was shown at the Perpignan Visa Pour L'Image Photo Festival in France in 1997 and received three awards in the Pictures of the Year Competition in the U.S. She received the "Prix Special du Jury" at the Festival International du Scoop et du Journalisme in Angers, France for her black and white images of the famine in southern Sudan in 1998. The photograph titled a "A Son's Love" from her story of Caroline Natamu was given an award of excellence in the 1999 Pictures of the Year competition.

Return to AIDS in Africa Photoessay