"Impact Journalism with a Feminist Lens" by Gabriella Toth

Gabriella is an award-winning photographer with a decade of experience working for various studios and projects in commercial portrait photography.

She founded LensFormative with the mission to connect people and impact-driven organizations through art. LensFormative helps humanitarian organizations showcase their work to a larger community to develop stronger global understanding, exchange, and global connections. The aim is to encourage and empower members of the community to ask questions, challenge systems, and help more people get involved in impactful causes through volunteering and donating.

Gabriella's first assignment with LensFormative took her to Nepal to capture the life and work of the Kung Fu Nuns, an order of Buddhist nuns, at the Druk Amitabha Monastery. The Drukpa nuns are community activists promoting gender equality, environmental sustainability, and intercultural tolerance in their home villages in the Himalayas, where women's access to educational and economic opportunities is some of the lowest in the world.

She had landed in Kathmandu in March of 2021 on the last incoming flight before the world shut down again amid the devastating Delta-variant outbreak that pushed the country's healthcare system to its meager limits. Indefinitely stuck in one of the strictest military-enforced lockdowns in a foreign country, Gabriella and videographer Nazleen Carlson set out to the monastery. They were granted two days instead of the agreed one week, that is, if they were able to make their way through countless army checkpoints and the imposed daily 23-hour curfew.

This conversation will introduce the Kung Fu Nuns and reflect on the realities of being in the field as a female photojournalist. Images will be showcased from the project and pictures of locals during the lockdown.