Manuel Ortiz Escámez

Manuel Ortiz Escámez has a long-standing career at the intersection of documentary photography, journalism, and social sciences, with a focus on human rights, democracy, and migration. He holds a B.A. in Sociology and an M.A. in Visual Arts with a specialization in documentary film from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

He is the founder and director of Peninsula 360 Press, a community media outlet based in San Mateo County, California. He previously served as Director of International News at Notimex (the Mexican State News Agency) and led the Multimedia Laboratory for Social Research at UNAM. He is the author of Visual Sociology: Photography and Documentary Video as Instruments for the Construction and Dissemination of Knowledge in the Social Sciences (UNAM, 2017). Ortiz also serves on the advisory board of POYLatam, the most recognized documentary photography and multimedia competition in Ibero-America.

He was the Director of Photography for the documentary "Cantadoras, Memory of Life and Death in Colombia" (2017), which received awards at international festivals in England, Nigeria, Chile, and Colombia. In 2021, he received the Prosser Award from the International Visual Sociology Association. His journalism has also been recognized with several awards, the most recent being the Media Innovation Award (2024), granted by Black Media and American Community Media.

His work has taken him to document migratory, democratic, and human rights processes in Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, France, Guatemala, Honduras, Japan, Lebanon, Mexico, Peru, Poland, Spain, the United States, and Ukraine.