Bharat Choudhary has won the 2011 Alexia Foundation professional grant for his project “The Silence of Others,” which intensively documents “the emotional struggle of young Muslims in the face of negative perceptions and religious discriminations in the post 9/11 and 7/7 era.” Bharat Choudhary is a freelance photographer living in London. He received an MA in Photojournalism from the University of Missouri in 2010 and worked for the Columbia Missourian. He was awarded a Ford Foundation International Fellowship for his graduate education. He won first place in the International Picture Story category in the 2009 College Photographer of the Year competition.

Choudhary will receive a $15,000 grant toward the completion of his proposed project. There were 233 applications this year, which the judges narrowed down to six finalists. The five other finalists, without rank, are:

GMB Akash graduated with a BA in Photojournalism from Pathshala South Asian Media Academy in Dhaka. His work has been published in Time, Newsweek, Geo, Stern, Der Spiegel, and The Guardian among other publications. He was named one of PDN’s 30 Emerging Photographers in 2007 and has held many exhibitions of his work internationally.

Dominic Bracco II is based in Mexico City and documents the effects of Mexican and North American policies on the border region. He studied journalism and Spanish at the University of Texas at Arlington and contributes regularly to the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. He is also a founding member of the collective Prime, which seeks new outlets for photojournalism.

Jennifer Emerling graduated from Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara with a BA in Visual Journalism and attended Eddie Adams Workshop XXII. She was a winner in the 2009 Women in Photojournalism Contest.

Deanne Fitzmaurice worked as a staff photographer at the San Francisco Chronicle for 18 years. She has received many awards including the first place Video Feature from Best of Photojournalism in 2010, first place News in the 2008 Pictures of the Year International and the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Photography. Now a freelancer, she has work featured in Time Magazine, Newsweek Magazine, U.S. News and World Report, the New York Times Magazine and others. She published the photo book Freak Season in 2010.

Aaron Huey lives in Seattle and contributes to National Geographic Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Times and Harper’s. He serves on the board of the Blue Earth Alliance. In 2010, he presented his work on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation at the TEDxDU conference.

The competition was judged at Syracuse University on Feb. 19, 2011. The judges were Bob Sacha, multimedia producer and instructor; Eliane Laffont, photo industry veteran and Visa Pour L’Image advisor, and Annie Griffiths, National Geographic photographer and founder of Ripple Effect Images.

About the Alexia Foundation

The Alexia Foundation awards a grant annually to a professional and student photographer to help them create work that contributes to world peace and cross-cultural communication. The Foundation was created by Peter and Aphrodite Tsairis to honor their daughter Alexia, one of 35 students studying abroad under the auspices of Syracuse University who died as a result of a terrorist bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie Scotland. Alexia Tsairis’s abiding beliefs were in the capacity and responsibility of individuals to shape and advance peace in our time. The Alexia Foundation is dedicated to providing students and professionals with the means to do so.

Bharat Choudhary's portfolio