The Women of Al Rashad | Rita Leistner

World Mad Pride presents Rita Leistner’s  photographic portraits of women residents at the Al Rashad Psychiatric Hospital in Baghdad. Other recent projects include a profile of an American Cavalry Unit during a three-month embed in the spring and summer of 2003;, and a feature on the gravediggers at the cemetery of Najaf during the August-September siege of 2004.

Direct from Brooklyn, NY, and born in Toronto, Rita Leistner speaks about her experiences in Baghdad, Iraq, with the women at Al Rashad psychiatric hospital. Meet the artist at Gallery Gachet on June 25, 2-5pm.

Her photographs and stories from Iraq have been published in The Walrus, Newsweek, Time, Colors, Rolling Stone and Macleans, among other publications. She is co-author, with Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, Kael Alford, and Thorne Anderson, of Unembedded: Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq, which was published by Chelsea Green Press in October 2005.

Rita is a graduate of the International Center for Photography in New York, and has an MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto. She focuses on in-depth, long-term projects, and often writes the text that accompanies her photographs. Between April 2003 and September 2004 she spent ten months covering the war in Iraq, and is currently working on stories in Canada and Cambodia.

Rita?s work has received awards from The Best of Photojournalism and the Canadian National Magazine Awards. In addition, she has won bursaries from The Rory Peck Trust and The Canada Council for the Arts, as well as a fellowship from The International Center for Photography.

We would like to acknowledge Rita Leistner for coming to Vancouver to share this important work. www.ritaleistner.com