Yalda Moaiery

Yalda Moaiery is an Iranian photojournalist who has covered conflict, war, and natural disasters for the past 20 years. She started her career covering the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and has since documented the aftermath of the tsunami in Indonesia, Afghanistan’s first parliamentary election, floods in Pakistan, and conflicts in Lebanon, Georgia, and Russia.

Throughout her career, women have been a focal point of Moaiery’s photographic work. She has documented women working as security guards for the Iranian regime, and the inception of the special police dealing with women and enforcing mandatory hijab laws in Iran. In December 2017, she captured an image of a student protesting economic conditions at Tehran University, which became an iconic symbol of Iranian protests and gained international attention. Subsequently, Yalda was sentenced to two years in prison, serving time in Gharchak, a place she had photographed years before. Upon her release, she embarked on a project capturing the stories of 30 women sharing their experiences in prison.

In 2022, Yalda Moaiery spent three months in jail and was sentenced to 8 years in prison for covering protests surrounding the death of Mahsa Amini.

Yalda Moaiery’s work has been widely published in international outlets such as Le Monde, Le Figaro, TIME, The Washington Post, Elle, Liberation, The Mail on Sunday, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The New York Times, among others. In 2023, she was awarded the IWMF Courage in Journalism Award, and was an awarded prize winner at the Istanbul Photo Awards. Moaiery also served on the 2023 jury of the World Press Photo Exhibition, and in 2024 she received the Wallis Annenberg Justice for Women Journalists Award. Her first solo exhibition, Standing in the Dust: Photography of Yalda Moaiery, was exhibited at the Sausalito Center for the Arts in July 2024.