Erin Siegal

Last Login 05/21/12

• Oakland, CA
• Backed 9 projects
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As a Fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, Erin Siegal is working on a long-term project detailing corrupt practices in international adoption between Guatemala and the United States. In particular, she is working on breaking apart the criminal network involved in one case of child kidnapping for international adoption.

Siegal was a 2008-2009 fellow at the Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where her Master’s thesis earned honors. She is a recipient of the 2008 Anne O'Hare McCormick Scholarship Award from the Newswomen's Club of New York and the Irving Lainoff Scholarship.

In 2006, Siegal co-directed and co-produced a 13-minute documentary, “Taking the Pledge,” exploring the impact of a Bush administration rule within USAID that stipulated that organizations receiving U.S. funds for HIV/AIDS prevention must sign an "anti-prostitution pledge." The effects of this Presidential Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) clause is told by sex workers from around the world in Khmer, Thai, French, Portuguese, and Bengali (with English subtitles). “Taking the Pledge” has been screened at the 2008 International AIDS Conference in Mexico City, the 2007 World Social Forum in Atlanta, and the 2007 International Conference on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific in Mali. It was produced in collaboration with the Network of Sex Work Projects and funded by the Urban Justice Center of New York City.

Since 2005, Siegal has worked as a photojournalist. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Time magazine, Rolling Stone, and many other magazines and newspapers. Her clients include Reuters, Human Rights Campaign, the New York Times, the Urban Justice Center, RollingStone.com, the United Nations, and more. Before beginning her freelance career as a Reuters contract photographer in 2005, she worked as photojournalist James Nachtwey’s studio manager and also assisted photojournalist / author Susan Meiselas with her book “Kurdistan.” She is based in Oakland, California.

Siegal was the co-founding Art Director of $pread Magazine, which won the Independent Press Association’s award for "Best New Title of 2005." She has also worked with various grassroots media collectives, including the New York City Independent Media Center, Boston Indymedia, and the NYC Grassroots Media Coalition.

Siegal's photography has appeared in the following two anthologies: “American Youth,” by the photographers of Redux Pictures, published by Contrasto, June 2009 and “Shut Them Down: The G8, Gleneagles 2005 and the Movement of Movements,” by various authors, edited by D. Harvie, K. Milburn, B. Trott, and D. Watts, Autonomedia, January 2006.