Arkasha Stevenson

Arka Stevenson is currently a Directing Fellow at the American Film Institute. She earned her B.S. in Joumalism from the University of North Carolina in December 2010. While attending school, she documented issues in the rural South, such as drug addiction and prostitution in Durham, N.C., and child care in Elizabethtown, KY. For the last year and a half, Stevenson worked at the Los Angeles Times, photographing a wide variety of subjects including the Occupy movement, the remote desert squatter camp of Slab City, the Coachella Music Festival, and the Stanely Cup overseas. For six months, Steven­son also had the privilege of documenting 19 year old Jesus Garcia's battle with terminal cancer. In 2011, Stevenson won first place in the Hearst Joumalism Awards Program, National Photojournalism Championship. She was named the 2011 College Photographer of the Year by the North Carolina Press Photographers Association and was awarded First Place for Multime­dia in the College Photographer of the Year competition. In 2013, Masha won Seoond Place in the short multimedia category at the World Press Photo Competition.