Professional Career

Sandra Balsells (Barcelona,1966).

In 1989, after graduating in journalism at the Universidad Autónoma of Barcelona, she moved to London where she began her career in the field of photojournalism. There, after completing a Postgraduate Diploma in Photojournalism at London College of Printing, she began her career as a freelance photographer.

In 1991, coinciding with the breakup of former Yugoslavia, she covers the outbreak of war in Croatia collaborating as a freelance photographer with the British newspaper The Times.

Between 1991 and the end of 2000, much of her photographic career focuses on the Balkans, where she documents the most significant events of successive Yugoslav wars in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia and Kosovo, working with various national and foreign media. She has also worked on numerous features in Israel, Palestine, Mexico, Romania, Canada, Cuba, Mozambique, Haiti and Sicily.

Is the author of Balkan in memoriam (Blume, 2002), an extensive photographic work through the most turbulent decade in former Yugoslavia; and coauthor of Montreal Metropole vue par 30 grands reporters (Aux Yeux du Monde, 2000). In the television field, she is the co-author of the documentary films Dying for the Truth (Channel 4, 1994) and Portraits of the Soul (TVC, 2004).

She has participated in over fifty solo and group exhibitions and her work appears in various public and private collections.

In 2006 she won the Ortega y Gasset Prize in the category “Best News Feature” for her work on the war and postwar years in former Yugoslavia.

In 2007, she participated in the project Universal Archive. The Condition of the Document and the Modern Photographic Utopia organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA).

In recent years she has curated several photographic projects among them Latidos de un mundo convulso (Lunwerg-Caja Madrid, 2007) an extensive work that includes a selection of the best photojournalism in Spain over the past 25 years where she also participates as a co-author; and Desaparecidos (2011), a documentary project of the photojournalist Gervasio Sánchez focused on the issue of enforced disappearance and displayed simultaneously at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Castilla and León, Center of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona and La Casa Encendida of Madrid.

Since 1995 she has been combining her work as a photojournalist with the teaching of photography at the University Ramon Llull of Barcelona.