Svetlana Bachevanova is the executive director of the FotoEvidence Foundation. She is a Bulgarian American photojournalist and a co-founder of FotoEvidence. The books she and her team publish expose injustice, create enduring evidence of violations of human rights and inspire social change.

Svetlana has worked with some of the most skilled and dedicated documentary photographers to publish their work, human stories recounting indisputable evidence of social injustice. In addition to managing the publication of books, FotoEvidence exhibits she curated have been mounted around the world to promote justice.

Svetlana conceived the FotoEvidence Book Award and the FotoEvidence W Award to support the work of photographers dedicated to the pursuit of human rights, publishing work that is unlikely to find commercial publication. Under her management FotoEvidence has occupied a unique space in the world of photojournalism as both a publishing house and activist organization.

Her career as a publisher has supported creative ideas and technology innovations, including the production of the “first true digital photo monograph” Bronx Boys by Stephen Shames, as mentioned in TIME magazine. (2011)

Svetlana’s life as a photojournalist and human rights activist started underground at the first anticommunist newspaper in Bulgaria (1988). Today she is leading an organization that supports photographers like her and her former colleagues, who bring light to dark places and move people to action.

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