Finbarr O'Reilly

Finbarr O'Reilly (born 1971) is a Welsh-born Irish/Canadian photographer. He is a regular contributor to The New York Times. O'Reilly won the 2019 World Press Photo First Place prize in the Portraits category, and also won the World Press Photo of the Year award in 2006. He is co-author of the joint memoir with U.S. Marine Sgt. Thomas James Brennan, Shooting Ghosts.

Early life and education O'Reilly was born in Swansea in South Wales and raised in Dublin, Ireland until he moved with his family to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada at the age of nine.

He joined Reuters as a freelance correspondent based in Kinshasa, Congo in 2001 In 2003 he co-produced The Ghosts of Lomako, a documentary about conservation in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In the same year he co-directed the documentary, The Digital Divide about technology in the developing world. shortlisted for a 2012 Academy Award.

In 2014, he was an Ochberg Fellow at the DART Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism in New York, in 2015 a Yale World Fellows and in 2016 a MacDowell Colony Fellow and a writer in residence at the Carey Institute for Global Good.

Shooting Ghosts (2017) is a joint memoir with Sgt. Thomas James Brennan, a U.S. Marine who he had met during one of his assignments in Afghanistan. Their unlikely friendship helped heal them after war.

Awards 2006: World Press Photo of the Year 2005 award of the annual World Press Photo contest. The color image shows the emaciated fingers of a one-year-old child pressed against the lips of his mother at an emergency feeding clinic in Niger. 2019 World Press Photo First Place prize in the Portraits category