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Brian Otieno: the photographer who showed Kibera to New York, Paris and London.
Kibera Creatives is a KNN series on the artists, designers and performers who built their names from Kibera. Profiles are compiled from published reports and the subjects' own public pages; sources are listed at the end. Spotted an error? Write to news@kibranewsnetwork.co.ke.
Brian Otieno, who works as Storitellah, is a photojournalist born and raised in Kibera. He began photographing his neighbourhood with a phone after finishing secondary school in 2012, launched the Instagram account Kibera Stories in 2013, and earned a journalism diploma from Multimedia University in 2016. He has worked professionally since then.
"I want to share the real stories from Kibera, the unseen and unknown," he told People Daily in 2020. "It's photography that saved me."
Awards
In 2016 he was one of 12 photographers, chosen from 110 portfolios, for the World Press Photo East Africa Masterclass in Nairobi. In October 2018 he won the first East African Photography Award at the Uganda Press Photo Awards with a Kibera image, Ballerina Elsie. He also took prizes at the 2017 Kenya Press Photo Awards and the 2018 Kenya Photography Awards. In 2019 he was selected for the New York Times Portfolio Review and received a Reuters photojournalism grant; in 2020 he was a National Geographic COVID-19 Emergency Fund grantee.
Where Kibera Stories has hung
The series has been exhibited in Paris and Kampala (2018), Lisbon (January 2019), at Photoville in New York's Brooklyn Bridge Park (September 2019, curated by James Estrin and David Gonzalez) and in London (August 2019). CNN ran a video feature on it in December 2020.
He has contributed to Everyday Africa since 2017, works regularly for AFP, and has been published by the New York Times, the Guardian, National Geographic, Der Spiegel, the BBC and Al Jazeera. He was on the Uganda Press Photo Awards shortlist again in 2023 and says he is based in Nairobi and available for assignments.
Sources:; Photoville, 2019; Business Today, 19 Oct 2018; People Daily, 29 Jun 2020;, 8 Dec 2020; Africanews, 9 Feb 2018; Uganda Press Photo Awards, 2023.
That was a Kibra News Network report, read by an A I voice.
Kibera Creatives is a KNN series on the artists, designers and performers who built their names from Kibera. Profiles are compiled from published reports and the subjects’ own public pages; sources are listed at the end. Spotted an error? Write to news@kibranewsnetwork.co.ke.
Brian Otieno, who works as Storitellah, is a photojournalist born and raised in Kibera. He began photographing his neighbourhood with a phone after finishing secondary school in 2012, launched the Instagram account Kibera Stories in 2013, and earned a journalism diploma from Multimedia University in 2016. He has worked professionally since then.
“I want to share the real stories from Kibera, the unseen and unknown,” he told People Daily in 2020. “It’s photography that saved me.”
Awards
In 2016 he was one of 12 photographers, chosen from 110 portfolios, for the World Press Photo East Africa Masterclass in Nairobi. In October 2018 he won the first East African Photography Award at the Uganda Press Photo Awards with a Kibera image, Ballerina Elsie. He also took prizes at the 2017 Kenya Press Photo Awards and the 2018 Kenya Photography Awards. In 2019 he was selected for the New York Times Portfolio Review and received a Reuters photojournalism grant; in 2020 he was a National Geographic COVID-19 Emergency Fund grantee.
Where Kibera Stories has hung
The series has been exhibited in Paris and Kampala (2018), Lisbon (January 2019), at Photoville in New York’s Brooklyn Bridge Park (September 2019, curated by James Estrin and David Gonzalez) and in London (August 2019). CNN ran a video feature on it in December 2020.
He has contributed to Everyday Africa since 2017, works regularly for AFP, and has been published by the New York Times, the Guardian, National Geographic, Der Spiegel, the BBC and Al Jazeera. He was on the Uganda Press Photo Awards shortlist again in 2023 and says he is based in Nairobi and available for assignments.
KNN Newsroom is the staff byline for stories written, rewritten and edited at the Kibra News Network desk. Where a story credits an outside outlet, the original source is linked at the foot of the piece.
