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.

Features

The 2022 SVA Masters Series honoree and keynote speaker at this year’s commencement exercises talks about her career, advice for young creative professionals and telling people’s stories through images