Carol Guzy is one of the most decorated photojournalist of her generation in a career spanning more than four decades. She specializes on long-form documentary human interest projects, news and feature stories, both domestic and international and is currently a contract photographer with ZUMA Press.

She has been awarded four Pulitzer prizes in photography, a feat only achieve by four other people, all of them men and none of them photographers. They include poet Robert Frost and playwright Eugene O’Neill. She was the first woman to receive the Newspaper Photographer of the Year Award from the National Press Photographers Association, then was awarded it two more times. Nine times the White House News Photographers Association named her Photographer of the Year and recently honored her with a Lifetime Achievement Award. This year the she will be receiving the LUCIE Award for her Achievement in Photojournalism. And the list goes on.

Carol grew up in a working-class family in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania where her mother worked factory jobs to support Carol and her sister after her father died when she was six years old. Following her mother’s advice, she obtained a degree in nursing, but her heart wasn’t in it. A boyfriend gave her a 35mm camera, and she took a photo class. After developing her first print she was hooked on photography, and never worked as a nurse. But the lessons of nursing school were not wasted. That education and the loss of her father had an everlasting impact on Carol, creating empathy for the suffering of all living creatures. That passion has led her again and again to end-of-life stories that she has told with heartbreaking love and tenderness.

At the Miami Herald Carol was assigned a story on an overlooked immigrant community known as Little Haiti. That experience would lead her to Haiti itself. Two of her four Pulitzers are for crises there, the first in 1995 for images of the U.S. intervention following a military coup, and the second for her coverage of the 2010 earthquake where between 100,000 to more than 300,000 people died. Accurate figures were a challenge. 

The Herald also gave Carol her first opportunity to cover an international crisis when they sent her to Ethiopia to cover a famine. Then in 1985 she and fellow Herald photographer Michel duCille were sent to a remote village in the mountains of Columbia to photograph a massive mudslide that killed more than 23,000 people. Carol’s image of a 13-year-old girl trapped in water with mud up to her neck just before she died was one of the photographs that won Carol and duCille the 1986 Pulitzer for Spot News Photography. It was her first.

In 1988 she joined the photo staff of the Washington Post. Working her entire career in a medium that thrives on the quick turnaround of a news story she has doggedly fought to tell the stories that take weeks or months of pursuit. Stories that only reveal themselves fully when the photographer and the subjects reach a level of intimacy that captures the humanity behind the headline. Along the way, Carol was awarded her second, third and fourth Pulitzer, including one for her coverage of the refugees in Kosovo in 2000. 

Most recently, Carol – as a freelancer -- has covered the war in Ukraine, gun violence in the greater Washington D.C. area, and the last days of a Cherry Tree known as Old Stumpy before it was cut down. She continues to seek out stories of people and other living things that struggle against difficult odds.