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After a six-week extension and nearly 3,000 visitors to her fall 2022 Masters Series exhibition, award-winning photojournalist Lynsey Addario will return to the School of Visual Arts this month as the honored guest speaker at its 48th annual commencement exercises.

In the months since “The Masters Series: Lynsey Addario,” Addario has continued her fearless documentation of the war in Ukraine, and has begun developing a limited-series adaption of her New York Times best-selling 2015 memoir, It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War, with Paramount and Studio 101. In a new interview with SVA given in advance of the ceremony, she talks about parenthood, work, making art for change and advice for young artists.

Congratulations on the incredible success of “The Masters Series: Lynsey Addario,” which drew a record number of visitors for a Masters Series exhibition to the SVA Chelsea Gallery. As the show was taking place, you were simultaneously covering the war in Ukraine. How have you seen things change there over the past few months and do you anticipate going back?

I am actually in Ukraine now for The New York Times Magazine. The war grinds on—Russian continues to attack both military and civilian targets, though these days, a majority of the strikes are in the east. This is my sixth trip since I first went to Ukraine in mid-February 2022, and while life continues as normal as it can in places like Kyiv and Lviv, away from the frontline in the east, the people who have remained in Ukraine live with the expectation that missile, drone or artillery strikes can happen anywhere and at any time.  

How do you typically adjust back to family life and routine when you return home? 

My children are 4 and 11 years old, so I don't really have the luxury of taking the time to adjust or rest after an intense assignment. When I am on assignment, my husband is alone with the kids, so when I get home, I generally must step up and help full-on. Ironically, this helps me adjust because I am thrown into the necessities of their lives, of their routines, activities, of cooking and doing laundry. So I am not sitting around idly contemplating what I have just witnessed, I am right back into the fold, being a mother and a wife.

As you prepare to speak at this year’s commencement, is there something you wish you knew as a college graduate about navigating the professional world as a photojournalist?

I guess the most important message I would like to impart is to believe in oneself, in one’s dreams and ambitions, and to not give up. 

I am so grateful to have been raised by incredibly supportive and artistic parents who constantly encouraged me and my three sisters to follow our hearts and do whatever we believed in. I think this is what made each of us successful in our respective lives and I’m not referring to financial success, because for me, money isn’t necessarily a measure of success as much as personal fulfillment is. 

I am a third-generation Italian American—my paternal grandmother arrived at Ellis island when she was a toddler, and two out of my other three great-grandparents were born in Italy. They all fled poverty and came to the United States like so many others with hope of more prosperous lives. My grandparents did not study beyond eighth grade and my parents only graduated from high school before continuing on to hairdressing school and opening their own very successful business. I write this because there was very little expectation for me to even go to [college], and I ended up graduating from University of Wisconsin-Madison with a BA in international relations and Italian, and now I have four honorary doctorate degrees. Those degrees were a result of my passion and dedication to my work as a journalist, chartering my own path in tandem with what I believed in.

What would you say to artists who want to use their work to advocate for change in 2023?  

I would say that art for social change is one of the many powerful ways to effect change, but keep expectations realistic. The road to change is long and full of challenges, gratifying in many ways, but change only comes with persistence and hard work, and creating work that rises above the chaos of our daily lives and touches people. 

It is a privilege to be able to use my camera to travel the world and tell people’s stories, and document the many facets of life and death with the hope to educate, inspire and affect change, but it didn’t happen overnight.     

What can you share about the development of your forthcoming limited series?   

At present, Paramount and Studio 101 have optioned the rights to my memoir It’s What I Do, and are planning a limited series based on my life and career. The pilot is currently being written by Emmy-winning writer Stephen Schiff.

Any other thoughts you would like to add? 

I think it’s important to note that it took me years of struggling and rejection, of not having any money in the bank and simply relying on belief in myself and my work to get to where I am now. It took almost a decade of photographing before I started getting consistent work, and now, more than 25 years into my career, I still hustle and I am still grateful for every assignment. I know how lucky I am to have a career in photojournalism that I feel so passionately about.

This year’s commencement will take place on Sunday, May 21, 1:00pm, at Radio City Music Hall. To tune in for Addario’s address, catch the live stream available at sva.edu/commencement and on Facebook Live, facebook.com/SchoolOfVisualArts.