Brian Palmer
May 2020

Meet our most recent artist-in-residence, Brian Palmer.

Brian Palmer is  a Peabody Award–winning journalist based in Richmond, Virginia. During his 30-year career he has photographed conflict, politics, activism, daily life, and more around the world and in his own backyard. His strength is capturing life candidly, clearly, and creatively.

Brian strives to tell stories in pictures about people and situations that might not otherwise be told, with integrity, professionalism, independence, passion, and compassion.

His photos have appeared in the New York Times, Buzzfeed, Narrative.ly; his writing in Smithsonian Magazine, the New York Times, and the Nation; and audio on Reveal.

His documentary, Full Disclosure, which appeared in 2011 on The Documentary Channel, along with several magazine articles and photo exhibitions, grew out of three media embeds in Iraq with U.S. Marines. In 2019, along with his collaborator, Seth Wessler, he received a Peabody for Reveal radio story "Monumental Lies.”

Before going freelance in 2002, he was a CNN correspondent and  Beijing bureau chief for US News & World Report.

Currently, Brian is working in collaboration with his wife, Erin Hollaway Palmer, on Make the Ground Talk, a documentary that evokes life in a historic black community that was uprooted during World War II to build a naval base, now a top-secret U.S. military installation. Another long-term project, photography of Virginia's neglected African American cemeteries, grew out of the documentary.