TORONTO: In conversation with Barbara Davidson and Ian Brown

Barbara Davidson, BFA 90, LLD 19

Barbara Davidson is a Pulitzer Prize- and Emmy award-winning photojournalist, twice named International Photographer of the Year by POYi. 

Throughout her career, she has focused her lens on people attempting to maintain their dignity in the face of uncertainty in conflict zones and environmental disasters, with a particular focus on women and children trapped in a culture of American gun violence. She honed her storytelling approach over two decades across 58 countries, covering war, humanitarian crises and the human condition for the Los Angeles Times, The Dallas Morning News and The Washington Times.

In 2020 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and spent the year travelling across the U.S. making portraits of gunshot survivors using a traditional 8x10 film camera. A graduate of Concordia's Faculty of Fine Arts, she received an honorary doctorate from her alma mater in 2019. Born in Montreal to Irish-immigrant parents, Davidson is now based in Los Angeles.

Ian Brown

Ian Brown writes immersive, deeply reported, narratively-driven feature stories about a wide variety of subjects. He began his professional life at The Financial Post, writing about real estate, corporate intrigue and Ontario politics. Moving to Los Angeles, he wrote about golf, surfing and American culture. His three-part series about his disabled son was among the first multi-part multi-media stories published in The Globe and Mail, and went on to become a multiple-award winning book, The Boy in the Moon, which The New York Times judged one of the 10 best books of 2011. It has been published in seven languages.