The Town Hall & National Geographic Live Present David Guttenfelder, A Rare Look: North Korea to Cuba

National Geographic Live, National Geographic's touring speaker series, and The Town Hall are proud to announce the second event in its three-part speaker series, David Guttenfelder's A Rare Look: North Korea to Cuba on Tuesday, March 27, 2018 at 8pm. The Nat Geo series, focusing on three groundbreaking photographers, launched on February 27th with Anand Varma's Beauty and the Bizarre and will conclude on Tuesday, April 25th with Annie Griffiths' Photography Without Borders.

In 2011, David Guttenfelder made history when he helped the Associated Press open a bureau in North Korea - the first-ever Western news agency in the politically isolated country. For the first time, images of daily life in North Korea were sent to the world, while Guttenfelder himself acted as unofficial ambassador. He has since made more than 40 trips to North Korea.

In 2016, he broke through another wall when he boarded the first cruise ship in decades to travel from the United States to Cuba, and returned to the island to cover Fidel Castro's four-day funeral procession. His talent for crossing long-closed borders has led to some of National Geographic's most revealing geopolitical photo essays. He has spent his entire career as a photojournalist working, and living outside of his native USA.

Guttenfelder began as a freelancer in East AFRICA after completing his studies in Swahili at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. He spent 20 years as a photojournalist for the Associated Press based in Nairobi, Abidjan, New Delhi, Jerusalem, and Tokyo covering news in more than 75 countries around the world.

A seven-time World Press Photo Award winner, Guttenfelder is also a seven-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2011 his story "Afghanistan's Opium Wars" was published in National Geographic magazine. Five more have followed on topics spanning Japan's Fukushima nuclear refugees, the slaughter of migratory songbirds, the damming of the Mekong River and the greater Yellowstone ecosystem.

Guttenfelder has also been an industry leader in smartphone photography and social media. He was named 2014 Instagram photographer of the year by TIME magazine, received the Shorty Award for online photography, and the 2013 the Online Journalism Award. He was part of the panel lecture, "Instagraming the News" at the 2014 SXSW digital conference. He is the founder of the Instagram collectives @everydayUSA and @everydayDPRK.

Born in Iowa, he graduated from the University of Iowa with a B.A. in Cultural Anthropology, African Studies and Journalism. His photos can be seen at http://www.davidguttenfelder.com/

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