Rate My Professor Daniella Zalcman

Daniella Zalcman is a Professor of Practice in the Department of Communication at Tulane University’s School of Liberal Arts. A Vietnamese-American documentary photographer, curator, and community organizer, she graduated from Columbia University with a degree in architecture in 2009. During her college years, she worked as a tabloid photographer for the New York Daily News and later freelanced for The Wall Street Journal. Over nearly two decades, Zalcman has reported for National Geographic Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, BuzzFeed News, TIME, Mashable, and The New York Times, with her work centering on the legacies of western colonization—from the rise of homophobia in East Africa to the forced assimilation education of Indigenous children in North America. Her photographs have also appeared in Vanity Fair and Sports Illustrated. In 2012, she created and self-published New York + London: A Collection of Double Exposures, a limited-run photo book overlaying images from the two cities.

Zalcman’s ongoing project Signs of Your Identity documents survivors of Canada’s residential schools through overlaid portraits and interviews, resulting in a 2016 book published by FotoEvidence. The project earned the Arnold Newman Prize, Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award in 2017, FotoEvidence Book Award in 2016, Magnum Foundation’s Inge Morath Award in 2016, and inclusion in Open Society Foundations’ Moving Walls 24. She curated What We See: Women & Nonbinary Perspectives, published by White Lion in 2023, which received Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Bronze Awards for Women’s Studies and Photography. Zalcman founded and directs Women Photograph, a nonprofit elevating women and nonbinary visual journalists worldwide, and co-founded Indigenous Photograph and We, Women. She co-authored the Photo Bill of Rights and has served on the boards of the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund (2017-2023), ACOS Alliance (2018-2023), Overseas Press Club (2021-2025), and New Orleans Photo Alliance (2025-present). A Catchlight Fellow and International Women’s Media Foundation fellow, she has received multiple grants from the National Geographic Society and Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Prior to Tulane, she was a visiting professor at Wake Forest University (2018-2020) and T. Anthony Pollner Distinguished Professor at the University of Montana (2022). At Tulane, she teaches Community Engagement Journalism and has curated Việt Nam in New Orleans.