Biography

Tanya Habjouqa was born in Jordan and educated in the United States, receiving her masters in Global Media and Middle East Politics from the University of London SOAS.

Habjouqa has worked on the front lines in Iraq, Lebanon, Darfur, and Gaza - most recently documenting the everyday lives of Palestinian women in the Gaza Strip. She is working on personal projects that explore socio-political dynamics, occupation, and subcultures of the Levant.

Habjouqa is a recipient of the Magnum Foundation 2013 Emergency Fund for her project Occupied Pleasures, her perspective on life in the Occupied Territories. The series captures moments of respite for people coping with limited freedom of movement. With it she aims to reveal the quirky and often modest moments of fun for people in Palestine, and with that the fabric of a society mostly seen through the lens of hard news, its fast pace demanding a different level of engagement.

Beginning her career in Texas, she documented Mexican migrant communities and urban poverty before returning to the Middle East. Tanya is known for gaining unique access to sensitive gender, social and human rights stories in the Middle East.

Habjouqa received the 2011 SND Silver Award for her Gaza story A Life Less Ordinary, the 2007 Clarion Award for coverage of the Israel-Hezbollah War for Bloomberg and the 2006 Global Health Council award for humanitarian photography with her Darfur coverage.

She is published in Foreign Policy, Le Monde, Time Magazine, Wall Street Journal, National, Al Jazeera, Washington Post, New York Times, Boston Globe, Aeon Magazine, Jerusalem Report, Business Week, and the academic journal: Cultures of Resistance. Clients include the National, Bloomberg, Brownbook, UNDP, UNRWA, UNESCO, USAID, and the Said Foundation.