User:Nyahalexander/Ana Maria Arevalo Gosen

Ana Maria Arévalo Gosen
(born in 1988) is a Venezuelan visual storyteller, singer, and artist who is interested in exploring women’s rights, social justice, the prison system, and migration through photography. She is best known for her awarded project, Dias Eternos (2018), in which she photographed Venezeulan women in pre-trial detention centers to document their daily routines and the realities of prisons in Venezuela. Gosen has sense been recognized by The Pulitzer Center, Nikon, National Geographic, and The New York Times.

Early Life and Education
Ana Maria Arévalo Gosen was born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1988. At the age of twenty one, she moved to Toulouse France where she studied political science at Institut d’Etudes Politiques, and later photography at ETPA Ecole de photographie. Following the completion of her studies, Gosen moved to Hamburg, Germany in 2014 where she began to practice the art of visual storytelling while working for a magazine and doing outside photography projects. Gosen now resides in Bilbao, Spain and returns home to Venezuela for a few months every year to visit her family and continue her activist and storytelling work.

Notable Art and Career
Ana María Arevalo Gosen is widely known for her 2016-2017 project, The Meaning of Life, which intimately details the story of her husband’s battle with testicular cancer one year into their marriage. The photo series shows Gosen’s husband’s fight with cancer from the time that he starts chemotherapy to hospital stays. The Meaning of Life gained a great deal of attention from podcasts and publications covering the photo series being featured in a number of photography festivals. This notoriety led to the Meaning of Life being used annually as an exhibition to partner with different organizations and bring awareness to and fund research about testicular cancer.

In 2018, Ana María Arevalo Gosen took on what would become one of her most famous and awarded projects to date, Días Eternos. In this project, Arevalo Gosen travels back to her home country of Venezuela to examine and expose the Criminal Justice System and the heartbreaking realities of the women awaiting trial in these prisons and detention centers. The project documents the dangers for women in the specific prison she visited as they are not separated from convicted criminals nor men, the pregnant women receive no level of prenatal care or medical attention, and lack of food and water. Gosen not only raises awareness to these women's situation through this project, but also highlights their personalities, femininity, and gives them a platform to share who they are beyond incarcerated women.

Women Water Defenders detailed the water shortages in El Salvador and the group of middle-aged women from Santo Tomás that have joined together to bring awareness to the issue and demand that the government provide them with clean water when there are shortages. Her photos document women bathing themselves and their children with bowls and buckets of water, the women of the group meeting and organizing, but also of what their homes and daily lives look like. This project was completed in tandem with National Geographic.