Brenda Ann Kenneally is a mother, activist, and visual journalist who lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her long-term projects are intimate portraits of social issues that intersect where the personal is political. Brenda's own involvement in the criminal justice system when she was a child has given her an insight and commitment to projects that reveal the human cost of misguided public policies in The United States.
The result of a decade of reporting, Kenneally’s book and web publication MONEY, POWER, RESPECT; Pictures of My Neighborhood have received numerous awards: The W. Eugene Smith Award for Humanistic Photography, a Soros Criminal Justice Fellowship, The Mother Jones Documentary Photography Award, and The International Prize for Photojournalism in Gijon Spain. Kenneally was among the earliest to embrace multi -platform media. Her independent collective pioneered in making and distributing serialized reporting via the web. In 2006 the multimedia component of Money, Power, Respect, won the Best of Photojournalism Award for overall Best Use of the Web by the National Press Photographers Association. Kenneally is working to push the boundaries of the social document, using the web as a tool to expand and contextualize her Gonzo-immersion style of reporting.
In this spirit Kenneally and independent producer Laura Lo Forti founded The Raw File, a digital theatre dedicated to providing a space for provocative open-ended media.
In 2004, Kenneally began reporting on the lives of an extended family of teenagers who would come of age in the iconic post- industrial City of Troy, New York. The ongoing project Upstate Girls; Unraveling Collar City aims deep into the emotional and psychological cycle of poverty from a women’s eye view. The project has been supported to date, by a Nikon Sabbatical Grant, The Alicia Patterson Foundation, and The Cannon Female Photojournalism Grant. Getty Grant for Editorial Photography and an Open Society Distribution Grant, A New York State Council for The Arts Individual Artist Grant and a print acquisition form The United States Library of Congress. The project was awarded The Pictures of The Year International Community Awareness Award and First Place for Daily Life Stories at World Press International. The project is ongoing and has been exhibited through out the United States, Europe and Latin America.
