Yunghi Kim has been a photojournalist for over 40 years. In 1972, at age 10, Kim immigrated to the US from her native South Korea and joined her mother in New York. A staff photographer for the Quincy Patriot-Leader and later The Boston Globe, Kim has covered some of the biggest news stories over the last 40 years. Kim was a part of a small cadre of hard-charging, trailblazing women covering international conflict stories from Afghanistan to Kosovo to Rwanda, well before digital photography. She has been represented by photo agency Contact Press Images since 1995. In 1992, while covering the famine in Somalia, Kim and reporter Will Haygood, were pinned down by heavy fighting and taken hostage by a warlord. Days after her release, Kim returned to complete her assignment. When US troops entered the country months later, undaunted, Kim returned again to document. For her coverage of the Somali famine, she was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist. In 2003, Kim spent a harrowing nighttime hike into Iraq, in monsoon-like rain to cover the Iraq war for Time. She credits her courage and gumption to her spunky, determined, single mother. Kim is most proud of her documentation of former South Korean Comfort Women in 1996, who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese army during its occupation of Korea during World War II. It was the first intimate profile of the ‘grandmothers’ and it helped globally publicize the tragic CW story. For the last ten years, Kim has funded a $18,000 annual photojournalism grant to give back to her community.
